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Re: scientific data compression [message #38933] Sat, 03 April 2004 18:53
Mark Hadfield is currently offline  Mark Hadfield
Messages: 783
Registered: May 1995
Senior Member
> Benjamin Hornberger wrote:
>
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am trying to find out if there is a scientific data format which
>> suppports data compression and can be handled by IDL. We use netCDF so
>> far, but that doesn't support compression yet. HDF seems to support
>> compression as of version 4.2, but IDL supports only 4.1, is that
>> correct? Any alternatives?

It would be surprsing if there were any major file-format
incompatibility between HDF versions 4.1 & 4.2, though it's conceivable
that there are minor incompatibilities (for example, new compression
methods that were added to 4.2 and are not supported in 4.1).

It should take only a minute or two of rummaging around the HDF site to
check this out for yourself

--
Mark Hadfield "Ka puwaha te tai nei, Hoea tatou"
m.hadfield@niwa.co.nz
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA)
Re: scientific data compression [message #38943 is a reply to message #38933] Fri, 02 April 2004 16:11 Go to previous message
R.Bauer is currently offline  R.Bauer
Messages: 1424
Registered: November 1998
Senior Member
Benjamin Hornberger wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am trying to find out if there is a scientific data format which
> suppports data compression and can be handled by IDL. We use netCDF so
> far, but that doesn't support compression yet. HDF seems to support
> compression as of version 4.2, but IDL supports only 4.1, is that
> correct? Any alternatives?
>
> Thanks,
> Benjamin

Some data could be quite good packed (not compressed) by using the
scale_factor and add_offset attribute. This data could then be saved as
integer or byte. This will save a lot of space.

We are using netCDF too. If we don't have much _FillValues or missing_values
then the filesize would not get much smaller if we try this with bzip2 or
gzip for our files. Did you have tried such a compression method before ?

HDF SD and netCDF will be in Version 4 of netCDF the same.


Reimar



--
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