How to Create Publishable NetCDF Data

This tutorial tries to provide a pragmatic guide on creating netCDF files that are compliant with the CF Conventions.

For researchers who want to publish your datasets in netCDF format, or make your netCDF datasets more findable, interoperable, and reusable in your community, we hope this tutorial can be helpful to you.

The core content is based on a widely adopted metadata standard, the CF Conventions, that provides guidelines and recommendations on constructing standard netCDF files from variable data. Our goal is to equip you with the ability to use the documentation of the CF Conventions as a tool when creating netCDF files. Thus, we prepared rich examples and hands-on exercises along with the theory. It is of course not a “must” to examine all the examples and exercises in order to work with the CF Conventions, please feel free to take a closer look into the chapters that suit best to your needs. But if you are a newcomer to netCDF data, we’d like to recommend you start from the beginning, at least finish reading the first two chapters before jumping to a later chapter of your interest.

After this tutorial, we hope you are able to use the CF Conventions as a data curation tool, and creat publishable netCDF data on your own!