NetCDF-4 is a NASA-funded effort to improve:
- interoperability among scientific data representations
- integration of observations and model outputs
- I/O for high-performance computing.
NetCDF-4 combines the netCDF-3 and HDF5 data models, taking the desirable characteristics of each, while taking advantage of their separate strengths:
- NetCDF-3 is popular and easy to use, and includes many tools and multiple implementations.
- HDF5 is powerful, has high-performance, is efficient for storage and extensible.
The goal of netCDF-4 is to make netCDF more suitable for high-performance computing and large datasets, and to provide a simple high-level application programming interface (API) for HDF5.
- - Last modified:June 26th 2008