22 July 2019

NCAR RDA supported ERA5, ECMWF operational, and future reanalysis products to be provided in NetCDF format

The Research Data Archive at NCAR plans to restructure and translate future reanalysis products, selected operational NWP products, and selected in-situ observational data products into CF-compliant NetCDF from the native NWP formats moving forward.  This action is being taken for a variety of reasons as described below.

NetCDF provides:


Additionally, restructuring and translating the data from native GRIB

formats to CF-compliant NetCDF solves interoperability issues
created by non-standard GRIB1 and GRIB2 encoding practices used by NWP centers to serve their internal use case needs.

For WRF users: Community efforts are underway to develop tools to translate NetCDF data into WRF-intermediate format.  Currently ungrib is the only tool provided to do this in the WRF preprocessing system (WPS) software package.  Some WRF users have developed their own tools and workflows to translate data from NetCDF into the WRF-intermediate format.