What is the best way to handle time using netCDF?
Discussions of conventions for representing time and handling time-dependent data have been a past topic of discussion on the netcdfgroup mailing list. When the subject comes up, interesting discussions often result, so we’ve archived past discussions on this subject at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/time/. A summary of Unidata’s recommendations is available from http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/time/recs.html. Briefly, we recommend use of the units conventions supported by the udunits library for time and other units attributes. Other groups have established more specific conventions that include the representation of time in netCDF files. For more information on such conventions, see the NetCDF Conventions Page at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/conventions.html.
