[RegCNET] Corrupted ERA-Interim files for 1990?

[Graziano Giuliani]

On 04/23/2013 12:28 AM, Raymond Arritt wrote:
> Dear RegCNet colleagues,
>
> Recently I downloaded the ERA-Interim atmospheric data from the ICTP site
> and it appears that the files for the year 1990 are corrupted.  The length
> of the files is shorter than for the other years, and 'ncdump' produces an
> error message, e.g., "ncdump: air.1990.00.nc: NetCDF: Unknown file
> format."
>
> These files were taken from http://clima-dods.ictp.it/data/d9/ERAIN150/1990
> (which is linked from http://users.ictp.it/~pubregcm/RegCM4/globedat.htm )
>
> I tried re-downloading the files for 1990 and still get the same error.
> The files for all of the other years appear to be intact.
>
> Can anyone else replicate this error?  Also is there another source for the
> ERA-Interim data?
>
> Thanks
> Ray Arritt
[...]

Raymond and regcnetters,

the format of ERA Interim data distributed by ICTP has been changed to NetCDF-4, 
which allows for transparent gzip compression to reduce the needed storage space.
Also other dataset have changed format or may change the format, because this 
reduces also network traffic to our server, and has allowed us to make a local 
copy of some of the CMIP5 GCM to ease the access to them.

The requirement to read the data is to have a netcdf-4 library (as reported also 
in the User Guide).

Note that the data can be transformed back to NetCDF 3 "classical" format using 
a netcdf-4 installation with the command:

nccopy -k 1 file_netcdf4.nc file_netcdf3.nc

Anyway the ERA Interim data can be obtained directly from ECMWF now using the 
ERA interim Web interface at:

http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets

Ciao!

Graziano.

-- 
Graziano Giuliani - Earth System Physics Section
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics
Strada Costiera, 11 - I - 34151 Trieste Italy