NetCDF Introduction

NetCDF is the chosen archival format for the GoMOOS buoy datafiles. the oceanographic community and is used at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the USGS branch of Atlantic Marine Geology, and Pacific Marine Environmental Labs (PMEL). It is a self-describing file format. One advantage of NetCDF is that the files are ``growable'', which makes realtime time series measurements easy. Please see [ NetCDF User's Guide for C ] for general NetCDF information.

For each data source, data is archived both as-is ("sensor-raw") and as-processed ("realtime"). For example, incoming met data typically has wind direction data that is not corrected for magnetic variation. The uncorrected wind direction data goes into the sensor-raw file, while the corrected goes into the realtime file. Think of the realtime data stream as the finished product. So basically there are always going to be two NetCDF files for each instrument, and since there are usually two datastreams for each instrument (one via GOES, the other via the cell phones), there are usually a sensor-raw, a goes-sensor-raw, a realtime, and a goes-realtime NetCDF file for each instrument.