Not losing precision on computations...

[strandwg@xxxxxxxx (Gary Strand)]

I'd like to avoid writing a program by using FERRET to compute some RMS dif-
ferences. The variables I'm using are defined as netCDF "double", yet accord-
ing to the manual:

  "The declaration "float" indicates that the variable is to be stored as
   single precision, floating point (32-bit IEEE representation). The
   declarations "long" (32-bit integer), "short" (16-bit integer), "byte"
   (8-bit integer) and "double" (64-bit IEEE floating point) are also supported
   by Ferret. Note that although these data types may result in smaller files,
   they will not affect Ferret's memory usage, as all variables are converted
   to "float" internally as they are read by Ferret."

Is there a way around this truncation?