ncarnate 2.0.3

Convert HDF4/HDF-EOS2 (MODIS, AMSR-E) to CF-annotated netCDF4 and losslessly recompress netCDF/HDF5 files.

ncarnate

Reincarnate legacy scientific data as modern netCDF4.

ncarnate reads netCDF3, netCDF4/HDF5, and HDF4/HDF-EOS2 files and writes recompressed, CF-annotated netCDF4. It does two jobs:

• Recompress netCDF/HDF5 files — change the compression level, shuffle filter, or storage layout without changing a single stored value.
• Convert HDF4 and HDF-EOS2 granules (AMSR-E, MODIS, and kin) to netCDF4, reconstructing the CF coordinates that modern tools (xarray, QGIS, Panoply) need: grid projections become CF grid mappings with 1-D x/y and 2-D lat/lon coordinates, swath geolocation is attached as CF coordinates, and dimension-mapped (e.g. 5 km → 1 km) geolocation is interpolated through ECEF space.

Problems this solves

Reach for ncarnate if you are trying to:

• Convert HDF4 / HDF-EOS2 granules (MODIS, AMSR-E, and kin) to netCDF4 so they open cleanly in xarray, QGIS, or Panoply.
• Read an HDF-EOS2 swath or grid that has no usable lat/lon — ncarnate reconstructs CF lat/lon coordinates and grid mappings so the data is actually georeferenced, instead of an unplottable array.
• Recompress a netCDF4 / HDF5 file — change the compression level or shuffle filter without altering a single stored value.
• Shrink an archive of scientific files without risking the science: every output is verified value-for-value against its source before it replaces anything, and stored values round-trip bit-identically.
• Batch-convert a directory tree of legacy granules to modern netCDF4 in one command.

The fidelity contract

Converting or recompressing a file changes storage, never science data:

• Every variable's stored values are preserved bit-identically — packed integers stay packed; scale_factor/add_offset/_FillValue are carried across as declarations, never applied.
• Every dimension (including unlimited-ness), attribute (including its type), and group survives. HDF-EOS2 StructMetadata is preserved verbatim; names netCDF cannot hold are sanitized with the original recorded in a companion attribute.
• Geolocation reconstruction is strictly additive: the original information always rides along, so the conversion never becomes the only copy of the truth. Swath coordinates are attached to variables whose first two axes are the swath axes; a variable with a leading band/byte dimension is converted intact but gets no coordinates attribute (a warning says so).
• Every output is verified against the source value-for-value before it replaces anything. A source file is never destroyed by a failed run, and HDF4 sources are never replaced at all.
• Unsupported constructs (user-defined netCDF types, unverified GCTP projections, exotic swath layouts) fail loud with a named error rather than guessing — a wrong coordinate is worse than a refused conversion. --no-geolocation converts the raw payload anyway.

The details, the guarantee boundary, and how the test suite pins each clause live in docs/fidelity-notes.md.

Installation

With conda (from conda-forge):

conda install -c conda-forge ncarnate

This works on every platform and is the recommended install on Windows — conda-forge's pyhdf is built against a proper HDF4 library everywhere, so the full HDF4/HDF-EOS2 converter runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux alike.

With pip (from PyPI):

pip install ncarnate

On Linux (x86_64) and macOS (arm64), every dependency — including pyhdf — installs as a self-contained binary wheel with no system libraries required. On platforms without a repaired pyhdf wheel (e.g. Linux aarch64), building from sdist requires the system HDF4 library first (Debian/Ubuntu: apt install libhdf4-dev).

Windows via pip: the netCDF/HDF5 recompression path works from PyPI wheels out of the box, but the HDF4/HDF-EOS2 conversion path does not — pyhdf's Windows wheel ships no HDF4 runtime, so import pyhdf fails with a DLL-load error. Use the conda-forge install above for HDF4 on Windows (or WSL with the pip instructions).

Command line usage

# Recompress a netCDF4 file in place (verified before replacement).
ncarnate observations.nc --complevel 9

# Keep the original; write observations_recompressed.nc beside it.
ncarnate --no-overwrite observations.nc

# Convert an HDF-EOS2 granule -> granule.nc with CF geolocation.
ncarnate AMSR_E_L3_SeaIce12km_B02_20020619.hdf

# Convert the raw SDS payload only (unsupported-projection escape hatch).
ncarnate --no-geolocation granule.hdf

# Recurse over a directory tree.
ncarnate -r /data/archive

Exit codes: 0 success, 1 one or more files failed, 2 bad input paths or arguments.

Library usage

from ncarnate import recompress

# Lossless recompression; returns the output path.
recompress("observations.nc", complevel=9)

# HDF-EOS2 conversion; the .hdf source is never replaced.
recompress("granule.hdf", dst="granule.nc")

Example

The AMSR-E daily 12.5 km sea-ice granule this project grew up around:

File	Input	Output
netCDF4 recompression (--complevel 9)	42.6 MB	19.9 MB
HDF-EOS2 → netCDF4 (+ reconstructed lat/lon)	60.2 MB	35.5 MB

Both outputs re-read bit-identically to their sources; the conversion additionally carries CF polar_stereographic grid mappings and coordinates for both hemispheric grids. The northern grid's reconstructed latitudes/longitudes agree with The HDF Group's independent conversion of the same granule to within 10⁻⁵ degrees (about a metre), the tolerance the test suite enforces.

Supported inputs

• netCDF4 / HDF5 and netCDF3 — recompressed via the netCDF4 library.
• HDF4 / HDF-EOS2 — read via the pyhdf SD API. GRID structures with GCTP polar-stereographic, geographic, and Lambert-azimuthal (EASE-Grid) projections; SWATH structures with direct or dimension-mapped geolocation. Output is always netCDF4 — HDF4 is never written.

Development

pip install -e ".[test]"
ruff check .
pytest

The test suite runs entirely offline against small committed fixtures trimmed from real granules (provenance sidecars included); cross-checks against the raw multi-MB granules self-skip where the local granule store is absent.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Built by Erick Shepherd.