The EFDC+ code has been upgraded to allow export of netCDF-CF (netCDF- Climate and Forecast) formatted data. This development has been conducted with the goal of providing EFDC+ output that can be read and displayed on web servers.
According to the UNIDATA User Guide the Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) software was originally intended to create, access, and share array-oriented data in a form that is self-describing and portable. These deal with a variety of data types that encompass single-point observations, time series, regularly-spaced grids, and satellite or radar images.
The netCDF software functions as an I/O library, that can be accessed from different programming languages such as C, FORTRAN, Fortran 90, C++, Java, Perl, Python, and other languages for which a netCDF library is available. The library stores and retrieves data in self-describing, machine-independent datasets. Each netCDF dataset can contain multidimensional, named variables (with differing types that include integers, reals, characters, bytes, etc.), and each variable may be accompanied by ancillary data, such as units of measure or descriptive text. The interface includes a method for appending data to existing netCDF datasets in prescribed ways, functionality that is not unlike a (fixed length) record structure. However, the netCDF library also allows direct-access storage and retrieval of data by variable name and index and therefore is useful only for disk-resident (or memory-resident) datasets.