Re: st: Reading NetCDF files

[Andrew Dyck <tempmail@andrewdyck.com>]

Hi Gordon,

I'm not familiar with NetCDF, but I do recall a colleague of mine
working with these files. He telling me that it's common for
researchers in the oceanographic/climate fields to use python to work
with NetCDF. I found this python module for reading and working with
NetCDF files.

http://code.google.com/p/netcdf4-python/

Once you have the data in python it should be straight-forward to
convert to a text file (tab or comma delimted) which could then be
read into Stata easily with -insheet-.

I also found this document which outlines a few methods for converting
NetCDF to text. This one seems like a good place to start.

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/faq.html#converttotext

Good luck!

Andrew

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Gordon Hughes <G.A.Hughes@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Dear Statalist,
>
> Is anyone aware of a Stata user-written routine or other method of importing data stored in NetCDF files into Stata?
>
> As background, NetCDF denotes the Network Common Data Form, a binary file format which is widely used for climate data and other data compiled by geophysicists, earth scientists, etc.
>
> There are libraries written in C, Fortran & Java which can be used to read NetCDF files but I was trying to avoid the need to special purpose routines to extract the data.  In addition, I believe that there are R modules which can read NetCDF files, but this means a struggle to remember the details of R data structures.
>
> I would be very grateful for any suggestions.
>
> Gordon Hughes
> g.a.hughes@ed.ac.uk
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