This netCDF summarizer requires that the netCDF library be installed on your
system.  If you have netCDF files you wish to summarize, but don't have the
netCDF library installed, you can find more information and the source code
for the library at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/index.html.

At the Climate Diagnostics Center we use the UniData udunits library to
store our time variables as doubles in the record variable of the
netCDF files.  The udunits library allows translation back and forth
between time values stored as a double in netCDF that represents the
elapsed time from a give starting point and a calendar date.  If you
also store time in this way and include a valid udunits unit string as
the "units" attribute of your record variable and your record variable
is called "time" the summarizer will format time strings as calendar
dates instead of doubles.  To activate this feature uncomment the
relavent lines in the Makefile.  If you would like to read more about our 
netCDF gridded data conventions take a look at 
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cdc/conventions/conventions.html

If you haven't the slightest idea what I'm talking about, the summarizer should
be good to go without the udunits library.  If you're curious about udunits
take a look at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/udunits/index.html.

Included with the source is a file called soif.h.  I use it to transliterate
any netCDF attributes that seem have SOIF equivalents into those SOIF 
attributes.  You may wish to take a look at this file and eliminate or add
attributes as you see fit.

The vast majority of this code comes from the original UniData netCDF code
for ncdump.

Roland Schweitzer				(303) 492-7365
CIRES, Campus Box 449				(303) 497-7013 FAX
University of Colorado, Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309-0449				rhs@cdc.noaa.gov
