ncBrowse: A Graphical netCDF File Browser

The netCDF file format and library have been widely adopted by the oceanic and atmospheric communities. The netCDF library provides a machine-independent format for representing array-oriented scientific data. NetCDF provides a very flexible and self-describing data format. However, many applications that use netCDF are designed to handle only a small subset of all the possible netCDF file structures and conventions.

ncBrowse is a Java application that provides flexible, interactive graphical displays of data and attributes from a wide range of netCDF data file conventions. ncBrowse enables a researcher to view the netCDF file schema using a "tree" or "table" presentation. The tree view provides a flexible interface, allowing the user to expand or collapse branches and nodes until only those schema elements (dimensions, global attributes, variables, and variable attributes) of interest are displayed. The researcher can graphically display subsets from multi-dimensional data arrays using the Scientific Graphics Toolkit (SGT). See http://www.epic.noaa.gov/java/ncBrowse and http://www.epic.noaa.gov/java/sgt for more information and download links for ncBrowse and SGT.