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Data Export (cwexport)

The cwexport tool converts HDF and NetCDF data files into various formats:

  • Binary — raw bytes of data of various native types, ie: 8-bit byte, 16-bit short, 32-bit float
  • Text — lines of latitude, longitude, and data value
  • ArcGIS — binary format for use in the ESRI ArcGIS software
  • NetCDF — NetCDF version 3 and 4 files (from HDF input files)
  • GeoTIFF — 32-bit float TIFF files with georeferencing tags

Take for example the MetOp-C ASCAT wind data file example_ascat_wind_mar_2023.nc — suppose we need to import the windspeed data into an analysis software package without using NetCDF format.  Try exporting the windspeed to a 32-bit float data file:

Terminal window showing output of conversion of windspeed data to a raw binary data file

You can see above that the output file windspeed.raw has the expected size of 540 x 1080 x 4 = 2332800 bytes.  A dump of the binary file contents (using the Unix od command) shows many NaN (Not a Number) values with some valid windspeed values (8.67 m/s, 9.13 m/s, …) just as in the original NetCDF file.  Now try the same thing with a text output file and check the results:

Terminal window showing the results of exporting windspeed data to a text file

You can see that the output is much larger (14 Mb) and that each line is a latitude, longitude, and windspeed value (note the same windspeed values as the binary file).

Try exporting the data to a GeoTIFF and inspect the results (we used the tiffinfo command from the LibTIFF package Links to an external site.):

Terminal output from exporting ASCAT data to a GeoTIFF file

Bonus exercises:

  • Export just the IceConc variable in the example_amsr_ice_conc_jan_2022.nc data file to a GeoTIFF using no TIFF compression.  Verify using the tiffinfo command.
  • Look at the examples in the cwexport man page to get ideas for other types of data exporting.
  • Try exporting the example_ahi_sst_feb_2023.hdf data file to both NetCDF 3 and 4 and look at the resulting file sizes.