HDF-EOS5 to netCDF-4 Converter

Effective 12/31/2012, this tool is no longer supported by The HDF Group because users are encouraged to deepen their expertise with aug_eos5, which will be supported continuously.

The HDF-EOS5 to netCDF-4 Converter is a tool that converts an HDF-EOS5 file to an equivalent netCDF-4 external file.

Unlike the HDF-EOS5 Augmentation Tool, this program creates a new netCDF4 file instead of modifying the existing HDF-EOS5 file. Unlike the augmented file that the HDF-EOS5 Augmentation Tool modified, the HDF-EOS5 library cannot access the converted file that this program created. The netCDF-4 library can access both the augmented file and the converted file.

Here is why the HDF-EOS5 library cannot access the converted file. This program doesn't convert the StructMetadata string dataset in the input HDF-EOS5 file because it maps the information in the StructMetadata to different datasets and attributes in the output file. Therefore, the HDF-EOS5 library cannot read the converted file any more because the HDF-EOS5 library always looks for the StructMetadata string dataset in an HDF5 file. ( Download)

Installation

This program requires two libraries.

HDF5
HDF-EOS5

Although the netCDF-4 library is not required to build this program, it is required to run the test suite in the package.

configure script is included in the package. The paths to the HDF5 external and HDF-EOS5 libraries should be passed to configure. You can also specify the path to the netCDF-4 library if you want to run the test suite in the package. Specifying h5cc as CC is a good way to avoid linking problems.

Figure 1 Configure the package

        $ ./configure \
CC=<hdf5_path>/bin/h5cc \
--with-hdf5=<hdf5_path> \
--with-hdfeos5=<hdfeos5_path> \
--with-netcdf4=<netcdf4_path>
      

The above command should succeed and generate Makefile. With Makefile, you can build this program by issuing make command. The generated binary is called eos52nc4.

Usage

This program takes exactly two arguments: input file name and output file name. It reads the input file and creates the output file in netCDF-4 format.

Limitation

HDF5 objects that the HDF-EOS5 library cannot access

This program assumes that the HDF-EOS5 library can access all HDF5 objects in the input file. If an HDF-EOS5 file contains an HDF5 object that the HDF-EOS5 library cannot access, this program does not convert it and the generated file will not contain any information about that object. This can happen when you add new objects into an HDF-EOS5 file using the HDF5 library instead of the HDF-EOS5 library. This limitation is due to the fact that this program uses the HDF-EOS5 library only to collect all information from the input file.

Download

Download the HDF-EOS5 to netCDF-4 Converter.

Last modified: 11/11/2020