Software

List of Plotting/Analysis Software useful for Reanalysis Datasets

1. CDAT: Climate Data Analysis Tools (CDAT) is a software system designed to provide access to and management of gridded climate data. It uses the Python scripting language which provides a general purpose and full-featured scripting language with a variety of user interfaces including command-line interaction, stand-alone scripts (applications) and graphical user interfaces (GUI). The modular CDAT subsystems provide access to the data, to large-array numerical operations (via Numerical Python), and visualization.
2. Ferret*: Ferret is an interactive computer visualization and analysis environment designed to meet the needs of oceanographers and meteorologists analyzing large and complex gridded data sets. It runs on most Unix systems, and on Windows XP/NT/9x using X windows for display.
3. GrADS*: The Grid Analysis and Display System (GrADS) is an interactive desktop tool that is used for easy access, manipulation, and visualization of earth science data. GrADS has two data models for handling gridded and station data. GrADS supports many data file formats, including binary (stream or sequential), GRIB (version 1 and 2), NetCDF, HDF (version 4 and 5), and BUFR (for station data). GrADS has been implemented worldwide on a variety of commonly used operating systems and is freely distributed over the Internet.
4. IDL*: IDL is a commercial cross platform data analysis/mapping/plotting code that is extremely customizable.
5. IDV*: is a Java(TM)-based software framework for analyzing and visualizing geoscience data. The IDV brings together the ability to display and work with satellite imagery, gridded data, surface observations, balloon soundings, NWS WSR-88D Level II and Level III radar data, and NOAA National Profiler Network data, all within a unified interface. 
6. Matlab: MATLAB is a high-level language and interactive environment w/extensive plotting and numerical processing available.
7. ncBrowse: ncBrowse is a Java application that provides flexible, interactive graphical displays of data and attributes from a wide range of netCDF data file conventions.
8. NCL*: Is an interpreted language designed specifically for data analysis and visualization.
9. Panoply: Panoply is a cross-platform application which plots geo-gridded arrays from netCDF, HDF and GRIB datasets. You can plot data as well as do some simple data analysis. Outputs are images, postscript and kml
   
    

*'d are OPeNDAP enabled

Dataset Analysis Tools

1. Excel: A desktop analysis tool. It can read netCDF files.
2. CDO: CDO is a collection of command line Operators to manipulate and analyse Climate and forecast model Data.
   
   Supported data formats are GRIB, netCDF, SERVICE, EXTRA and IEG. There are more than 400 operators available.
3. NCO: A (free) suite of programs that operate on netCDF files. Each operator is a standalone, command line program which is executed at the UNIX (or NT) shell-level like, e.g., ls or mkdir. The operators take netCDF or HDF4 files as input, then perform a set of operations (e.g., deriving new data, averaging, hyperslabbing, or metadata manipulation) and produce a netCDF file as output. The operators are primarily designed to aid manipulation and analysis of gridded scientific data. These tools are a powerful and easy way to perform simple manipulations on netCDF files without a major programming effort.

Read Files Remotely

1. GDS: The GrADS Data Server (GDS, formerly known as GrADS-DODS Server) is a stable, secure data server that provides subsetting and analysis services across the internet.
2. TDS: The THREDDS Data Server (TDS) is a web server that provides metadata and data access for scientific datasets, using OPeNDAP, OGC WMS and WCS, HTTP, and other remote data access protocols.