Hi Peng, Descriptor files won't work for this kind of data. Descriptor files are for the case of a set of gridded datasets which have the same variables on the same grid in the non-Time directions, and time step information consistent with different timestep(s) on a time axis in each file. In effect you need to have a gridded dataset that has its timesteps in separate files. There are dataset types in CF which describe non-gridded data: collections of profiles, trajectories, and so forth. Your data is really of this type. The CF document is here, http://cf-convention.github.io/1.6.html, and you'd be talking about "Discrete Geometries" datasets; Chapter 9 and Appendix H. There are some facilities for aggregating datasets as NCML files, if you have the data in a thredds server. I do not know the details about aggregating collections of swaths, but the information about that would be at Unidata (who support NetCDF and thredds). https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/ All of this is to say that there are some tools coming along for this kind of data, both in the CF/NetCDF community and for Ferret and LAS. We have been developing scripts and functions for Ferret to work with such collections, and our initial use of these - for collections of trajectories - will be described in an upcoming FAQ. Right now, of course things depend on what you plan to do with the data. To make subsets of the files, I'd suggest a Ferret script or a Unix script to call a Ferret subsetting script, having Ferret make a subset of each dataset in turn. Here's a sketch of what this might look like: ! Ansley On 4/11/2014 12:18 PM, Ge Peng - NOAA
Affiliate wrote:
|