NOTES:Instead, netCDF is one of four distinct lower layers on which the data and metadata structures for I/O API files are currently available; additional lower layers may very well be incorporated at various times in the future (Does anyone want to fund development of an MPI 2 lower layer? -- Contact the author!)
- The Models-3 I/O API is not a data format !!
- I/O API files are not synonymous with netCDF files !!
The I/O API provides a variety of data structure types for organizing the data, and a set of access routines which offer selective direct access to the data in terms meaningful to the modeler. For example,
Read layer 1 of variable 'OZONE' from 'CONCFILE' for
5:00 PM GMT on July 19, 1988 and put the result
into array A.
is a direct English translation of a typical I/O API READ3() call.
"Selective direct access" means that this READ3 call retrieves exactly
this ozone data immediately. It does not have to read through previous
hours of data, nor whatever other variables (such as NOX or PAN) are
in the file. Data can be read or written in any order (or not at all).
This characteristic provides the following advantages:
The I/O API also contains an extensive set of utility routines for manipulating dates and times, performing coordinate conversions, storing and recalling grid definitions, sparse matrix arithmetic, etc., as well as a set of data-manipulation and statistical analysis programs. It has an extensive documentation set, including
Various extensions and research efforts to the I/O API have been developed or are under development. Developments include the use of the I/O API interacting with PVM for model coupling, and adding operations to read or write entire time series (with multiple time steps) as single operations, and research projects include data-parallel I/O and a very powerful "geospatial cell complex" data type with polygonal-cell decompositions that may be both time independent (as for finite elememt modeling) and time dependent (as for moving-mesh plume-in-grid modeling).
are copyright © 1992-2002 MCNC and Carlie J. Coats, Jr., 2003-2005 by Baron Advanced Meteorological Systems (hereinafter, BAMS), and © 2005-2013 Carlie J. Coats, Jr.. The I/O API source code and documentation are copyright 1992-2002 MCNC and Carlie J. Coats, Jr., 2003-2013 by Baron Advanced Meteorological Systems (hereinafter, BAMS), and © 2005-2013 Carlie J. Coats, Jr. and distributed under the GNU Lesser (library) Public License (LGPL) Version 2.1, subject to copyright-statement retention constraints. See the Notices: Copyright, and Acknowledgements page.
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