[MOAB-dev] Converting NetCDF to MOAB

[Christopher Mueller]

Hi All,

I've been working a bit with the mbconvert utility to convert some of the meshes we've been working on to .vtk so we can visualize them, which has been working quite well.  However, I haven't had as much luck with converting NetCDF files to the MOAB .h5m format (or to the .vtk format).  I seem to get one of 2 errors on almost every attempt (I've only had success with 2 files out of 6 or 7 that I've tried).

The error is either (most common):

Failed to load "../test_data/ncom.nc".
Error code: MB_FAILURE (16)
Error message: No tag value for EntitySet 1

Or (much less common):

Failed to load "../test_data/sresa1b_ncar_ccsm3_0_run1_200001.nc".
Error code: MB_INDEX_OUT_OF_RANGE (1)
Error message: No tag value for Vertex 1

My initial assumptions were that the NetCDF file must represent a 'structured' grid (rectilinear or curvilinear) and that it should be CF compliant.  However I've noticed that the latter is not necessarily true (one of the files that worked was non-compliant) and I'm not sure about the former either (some of the files that did NOT work were of the structured grid type).  I've also noticed that for one of the files that did work (a 3D rectilinear grid that is NOT fully CF compliant), the only tags created were for the one variable that was 2D (no z dimension) and the highest-dimension entities in the mesh were faces rather than regions (I assume 3D grids simply aren't supported).

Is there a description of the set of requirements for successful conversion of a NetCDF file (in terms of form and/or convention)?

Thanks in advance,
Chris
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