Availability: ncrcat Short options: None |
base_time
, and a record variable, time_offset
.
Subtle but serious problems can arise when these type of files are
just blindly concatenated.
Therefore ncrcat has been specially programmed to be able to
chain together consecutive ARM input-files and produce
and an output-file which contains the correct time information.
Currently, ncrcat determines whether a datafile is an
ARM datafile simply by testing for the existence of the
variables base_time
, time_offset
, and the dimension
time
.
If these are found in the input-file then ncrcat will
automatically perform two non-standard, but hopefully useful,
procedures.
First, ncrcat will ensure that values of time_offset
appearing in the output-file are relative to the base_time
appearing in the first input-file (and presumably, though not
necessarily, also appearing in the output-file).
Second, if a coordinate variable named time
is not found in the
input-files, then ncrcat automatically creates the
time
coordinate in the output-file.
The values of time
are defined by the ARM conventions
time = base_time + time_offset.
Thus, if output-file contains the time_offset
variable, it will also contain the time
coordinate.
A short message is added to the history
global attribute
whenever these ARM-specific procedures are executed.