Data MET reads generally begins in either GRIB1 format, GRIB2 format, or as. PCP-Combine tool can convert the input gridded data into a NetCDF format.
Note: An older version of this information is available under the Documentation Tab of both and as. This page is maintained and should be considered the definitive version. We get this question often from users setting up their data workflow, particularly for datasets for which the data translation option, 'Get Converted Files' is available.
Data Access Matrix for ds083.2, which is available in its native GRIB1 and GRIB2 formats or translated to NetCDF. If you want data translation to NetCDF, click on the options circled in red. The answer (or non answer) is it depends upon which dataset you want to use (and dates within the series) and which tool(s) you will use to analyze the data. Is a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) international standard for exchanging GRidded BInary or General Regularly-distributed Information in Binary form data. Is the older format.
Improves upon the standard with the same compression software commonly used for images to gain a roughly 50% reduction in file size over GRIB1. Recently, version 2 of GRIB2 was released. It uses a slightly less aggressive form of compression, which leads to about 10% larger files than the first version of GRIB2, but decompresses about 10x faster. Is another binary format in common use in the weather and climate community. All three claim to be self-describing in the sense that the files tell you whats in that particular file.
GRIB1 descriptors are short and can be very cryptic. GRIB2 is slightly better, with longer self-descriptions. However, GRIB files in general depend on external tables referred to as to explain the details of the file contents.
NetCDF file metadata tends to be more complete and descriptive. You can perform many data processing tasks on GRIB files with (for GRIB1) and (for GRIB2). You can process and visualize GRIB files with (NCAR Command Language), (Climate Data Operators), (Interactive Data Language), (with or ), and (using the package) You can use the extensive if you convert the files to NetCDF.
![Converter Converter](http://image.slidesharecdn.com/jmahrgsmdatagrads-111212184433-phpapp01/95/guide-for-visualizing-jmas-gsm-outputs-using-grads-10-728.jpg?cb=1323724178)
However, be mindful that NetCDF files are not as compact as GRIB2, even when compressed. A 15 MB GRIB2 FNL ds083.2 file from 2014 can be 30 MB if translated to GRIB1 (an option we no longer support) or 86 MB in NetCDF format. Even with gzip compression, the GRIB1 and NetCDF files are 24 and 31 MB respectively. Read for details. Select your files, then click 'View Selected Files/Convert to NetCDF.' When the pop-up window appears, click on 'Request converting format to NetCDF for selected files.' In summary, try to store and use the data in it's native format.
This is not an endorsement of any given data format because there are shortcomings and strengths to all of them (but not with the same ratio). If you want a partisan but fair critique, I recommend John Caron's discussion,. But, if you are already familiar with data tools for a different data format such as NetCDF, and you have the bandwidth to handle the larger file size, then go ahead and translate it. You decide the tradeoff between download time and your learning time. If you are going to work with weather and climate data, then you will need to learn how to play with GRIB. You will probably also need to learn to play with NetCDF and HDF5. Stay tuned for our series about how to get started with GRIB and then NetCDF4/HDF5.
The Research Data Archive is managed by the Data Engineering and Curation Section of the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. © 2015-2019, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).
I have downloaded 'High Resolution Initial Conditions' climate forecast data for one day, it was in extension.tar.gz so I extracted it in my local directory and I get the files like in the attached image. I think, that the files without extension are GRIB data (because first word in them is 'GRIB').
So I want to get data from the big files (GRIB and NetCDF formats containing climate data like temerature & pressure in grid) to my database, but they are binary. Can you recommend me some easy way for getting data from these files? I can't get any information about handling their datasets on their website. Converting these files to.csv would be nice, but I can't find a program to convert the GRIB files. Using python and some available modules it is simple. The includes several, including netCDF4, to deal with NetCDF files!
I've never worked with GRIB files, but google tells that another python package exists,. Or you can use, a Python package that allows to read and write netCDF3 and netCDF4 classic format, and to read GRIB1 and GRIB2 files. I don't know the ammount of data you have, but usually it is crazy to convert it to.csv!
Python is easy to learn, and suitable to work with this kind of data (with matplotlib package you can even plot it). Or, if you really need it in a.csv, you can select with python a smaller domain, for example, or the needed variables.