Posted to SourceForge Jobs/Help Needed 20000826: The NCO project (http://nco.sourceforge.net) is looking for volunteers interesting in contributing to improving free software solutions for geophysical data processing. NCO software is used in most climate modeling and satellite data reduction research performed today. NCO is stable software written in C with a complete TeXInfo user's guide. NCO is uses the GPL license. See below*** for project description. We put out version 2.0 earlier this year, and are now seeking additional help to lead the significant modifications required to maintain NCO as a workhorse of the geophysical sciences. Our TODO list includes many items that any competent programmer could solve. Items range from straightforward technical extensions in C (e.g., migrating to GNU getopt()), to packaging (RPM generation), to build configurations (Makefile extensions, autoconf support) and web page improvements (a logo?) and maintenance. If you would like to hone your programming skills on a project that enjoys wide international scientific usage, contact zender@uci.edu for more information. More creative and challenging improvements to NCO are also desired. We have built a lexer-parser prototype capable of interpreting and performing generic mathematical operations on entire files from the shell level. This grammar needs sundry I/O and algebraic improvements as well as implementation and testing. The opportunity to code this in C++ is appealing. New metadata conventions in the geophysical modeling community require implementation/support in NCO. See, for example, the Climate/Forecasting (CF) and COORDS conventions at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/conventions.html. These include support for packed data and for irregular and reduced coordinate grids. The NCO TODO list is at http://nco.sourceforge.net/TODO Contact Charlie Zender <zender@uci.edu> or Henry Butowsky <thin@thin.screaming.net> if you think you'd like to help. Thanks, Charlie ***NCO Project Description: The netCDF Operators, or NCO, are a suite of programs known as operators. The operators facilitate manipulation and analysis of self-describing data stored in the netCDF or HDF4 formats, which are freely available (http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf and http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu, respectively). Each NCO operator (e.g., ncks) takes netCDF or HDF input file(s), performs an operation (e.g., averaging, hyperslabbing, or renaming), and outputs a processed netCDF file. Although most users of netCDF and HDF data are involved in scientific research, these data formats, and thus NCO, are generic and are equally useful in fields like finance. The NCO User's Guide illustrates NCO use with examples from the field of climate modeling and analysis. The NCO homepage is currently http://nco.sourceforge.org.
