SEACOOS CDL v2.0 December 9, 2004 4 Table 2.1. Data Sources Regional: ·    University of South Florida/COMPS ·    University of Miami/RSMAS-Explorer of the Seas ·    Skidaway Institute of Oceanography/SABSOON ·    University of South Carolina/Caro-COOPS ·    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/NCCOOS National: ·    National Data Buoy Center/National Weather Service(NWS)/NOAA   ·    Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services/National Ocean Service/National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)   ·    United States Geological Survey (USGS)/Water Quality and River Levels ·    National Weather Service/Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Table 2.2. Data Variables ·    Wind speed and direction ·    Wind gust ·    Horizontal and vertical wind components ·    Sea-surface temperature ·    Water- level ·    Ocean current speed and direction ·    Horizontal and vertical ocean current components 3. File Format Background 3.1 Network Common Data Form (netCDF) NetCDF is one of many available file formats for storing real-time observational data.  It is a relatively simple file format that is self-describing and portable.  “Self -describing”  means it contains data about the data, such as units and variable descriptions. “Portable” means that the data in a dataset is represented in a form that can be accessed by computers with different methods of storing integers, characters, and floating-point numbers.  It has a strong set of functional libraries that can compress, subset and transform data.  The netCDF software libraries and documentation are available from Unidata (http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/netcdf/). Many manipulation and display software utilities are available for netCDF (http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/netcdf/software.html).