This procedure will allow you to read netCDF files that are consistent with the COARDS standard. Actually, the routine that is used will only read netCDF files written to the subset of COARDS that is employed at NOAA CDC. "sdfopen," for example, will complain if the time units are not "hours" (COARDS allows for days, hours, seconds). NetCDF files that are not COARDS-compliant might be readable with a GrADS utility called "xdfopen". You need to have GrADS version 1.6 or later. GrADS cannot write netCDF files at this point.
The GrADS home page is linked here.
The "sdfopen"
routine, which is used in the following example, is documented
partially in this link.
In the example that follows, the input file to be read is entitled 'air79.nc'.
To open a file, once you are in GrADS, just type: -> sdfopen air79.nc This command will open the file and give you some info., in particular the name of the variable. In this case, the result is: -> ...found displayable variable air .... Then you can fix the time/level that you want to look at: -> set lev 500 -> set t 30 And finally, the command to display is just: -> d air To clear the screen -> clear (or just c) To quit -> quitGrADS information provided by Rene Garreaud (rgarreau@djf.uchile.cl).
The GrADS WWW home page provides documentation on GrADS commands. There is also a short and useful tutorial. Go to the GrADS home page and scroll down to the "example.tar" link. Pull "example.tar" over, untar it ("tar xvf example.tar", a UNIX operation), and look at the examples.