Provided by: gmt-common_5.4.3+dfsg-1_all 
NAME
grdconvert - Convert between different grid formats
SYNOPSIS
grdconvert ingrdfile[=id[+sscale][+ooffset][+ninvalid]]
-Goutgrdfile[=id[+sscale][+ooffset][+ninvalid]][:driver[/datatype]]] [ -N ] [ -Rregion
] [ -V[level] ] [ -fflags ]
Note: No space is allowed between the option flag and the associated arguments.
DESCRIPTION
grdconvert reads a grid file in one format and writes it out using another format. As an
option the user may select a subset of the data to be written and to specify scaling,
translation, and NaN-value.
REQUIRED ARGUMENTS
ingrdfile
The grid file to be read. Append format =id code if not a standard COARDS-compliant
netCDF grid file. If =id is set (see below), you may optionally append any of
+sscale, +ooffset, and +ninvalid. The first two options will scale the data and
then offset them with the specified amounts after reading while the latter lets you
supply a value that represents an invalid grid entry, i.e., ‘Not-a-Number’ (for
floating-point grids this is unnecessary since the IEEE NaN is used; however
integers need a value which means no data available). When id=gd, the file will be
read using the GDAL library, which will take care to detect the format of the file
being read. This mechanism is actually used automatically when the file format is
not one of those that GMT recognize. However, sometimes the guessing may fail, so
adding id=gd forces a read via GDAL. See Section grid-file-format of the GMT
Technical Reference and Cookbook for more information.
-Goutgrdfile
The grid file to be written. Append format =id code if not a standard
COARDS-compliant netCDF grid file. If =id is set (see below), you may optionally
append any of +sscale, +ooffset, and +ninvalid. These modifiers are particularly
practical when storing the data as integers, by first removing an offset and then
scaling down the values. Since the scale and offset are applied in reverse order
when reading, this does not affect the data values (except for round-offs). The +n
modifier let you append a value that represents ‘Not-a-Number’ (for floating-point
grids this is unnecessary since the IEEE NaN is used; however integers need a value
which means no data available). You may specify +sa for auto-adjusting the scale
and/or offset of packed integer grids (=id+sa is a shorthand for =id+sa+oa). When
id=gd, the file will be saved using the GDAL library. Append the format :driver and
optionally the output datatype. The driver names are those used by GDAL itself
(e.g., netCDF, GTiFF, etc.), and the data type is one of
u8|u16|i16|u32|i32|float32, where ‘i’ and ‘u’ denote signed and unsigned integers
respectively. The default type is float32. Note also that both driver names and
data types are case insensitive. See Section grid-file-format of the GMT Technical
Reference and Cookbook for more information.
Consider setting IO_NC4_DEFLATION_LEVEL to reduce file size and to further increase
read/write performance. Especially when working with subsets of global grids,
masks, and grids with repeating grid values, the improvement is usually
significant.
OPTIONAL ARGUMENTS
-N Suppress the writing of the GMT header structure. This is useful when you want to
write a native grid to be used by grdraster. It only applies to native grids and is
ignored for netCDF output.
-Rxmin/xmax/ymin/ymax[+r][+uunit] (more …)
Specify the region of interest.
-V[level] (more …)
Select verbosity level [c].
-f[i|o]colinfo (more …)
Specify data types of input and/or output columns.
-^ or just -
Print a short message about the syntax of the command, then exits (NOTE: on Windows
just use -).
-+ or just +
Print an extensive usage (help) message, including the explanation of any
module-specific option (but not the GMT common options), then exits.
-? or no arguments
Print a complete usage (help) message, including the explanation of all options,
then exits.
FORMAT IDENTIFIER
By default, grids will be written as floating point data stored in binary files using the
netCDF format and meta-data structure. This format is conform the COARDS conventions. GMT
versions prior to 4.1 produced netCDF files that did not conform to these conventions.
Although these files are still supported, their use is deprecated. To write other than
floating point COARDS-compliant netCDF files, append the =id suffix to the filename
outgrdfile.
When reading files, grdconvert and other GMT programs will try to automatically recognize
the type of the input grid file. If this fails you may append the =id suffix to the
filename ingrdfile.
┌───┬──────────────────────────────────┐
│ID │ Explanation │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│nb │ GMT netCDF format (8-bit │
│ │ integer, COARDS, CF-1.5) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ns │ GMT netCDF format (16-bit │
│ │ integer, COARDS, CF-1.5) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ni │ GMT netCDF format (32-bit │
│ │ integer, COARDS, CF-1.5) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│nf │ GMT netCDF format (32-bit float, │
│ │ COARDS, CF-1.5) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│nd │ GMT netCDF format (64-bit float, │
│ │ COARDS, CF-1.5) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│cb │ GMT netCDF format (8-bit │
│ │ integer, deprecated) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│cs │ GMT netCDF format (16-bit │
│ │ integer, deprecated) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ci │ GMT netCDF format (32-bit │
│ │ integer, deprecated) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│cf │ GMT netCDF format (32-bit float, │
│ │ deprecated) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│cd │ GMT netCDF format (64-bit float, │
│ │ deprecated) │
└───┴──────────────────────────────────┘
│bm │ GMT native, C-binary format │
│ │ (bit-mask) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│bb │ GMT native, C-binary format │
│ │ (8-bit integer) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│bs │ GMT native, C-binary format │
│ │ (16-bit integer) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│bi │ GMT native, C-binary format │
│ │ (32-bit integer) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│bf │ GMT native, C-binary format │
│ │ (32-bit float) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│bd │ GMT native, C-binary format │
│ │ (64-bit float) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│rb │ SUN rasterfile format (8-bit │
│ │ standard) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│rf │ GEODAS grid format GRD98 (NGDC) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│sf │ Golden Software Surfer format 6 │
│ │ (32-bit float) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│sd │ Golden Software Surfer format 7 │
│ │ (64-bit float, read-only) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│af │ Atlantic Geoscience Center │
│ │ format AGC (32-bit float) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ei │ ESRI Arc/Info ASCII Grid │
│ │ Interchange format (ASCII │
│ │ integer) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ef │ ESRI Arc/Info ASCII Grid │
│ │ Interchange format (ASCII float) │
├───┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│gd │ Import/export through GDAL │
└───┴──────────────────────────────────┘
GMT STANDARD NETCDF FILES
The standard format used for grdfiles is based on netCDF and conforms to the COARDS
conventions. Files written in this format can be read by numerous third-party programs and
are platform-independent. Some disk-space can be saved by storing the data as bytes or
shorts in stead of integers. Use the scale and offset parameters to make this work without
loss of data range or significance. For more details, see App-file-formats.
Multi-variable grid files
By default, GMT programs will read the first 2-dimensional grid contained in a
COARDS-compliant netCDF file. Alternatively, use ingrdfile?varname (ahead of any optional
suffix =id) to specify the requested variable varname. Since ? has special meaning as a
wildcard, escape this meaning by placing the full filename and suffix between quotes.
Multi-dimensional grids
To extract one layer or level from a 3-dimensional grid stored in a COARDS-compliant
netCDF file, append both the name of the variable and the index associated with the layer
(starting at zero) in the form: ingrdfile?varname[layer]. Alternatively, specify the value
associated with that layer using parentheses in stead of brackets:
ingridfile?varname(layer).
In a similar way layers can be extracted from 4- or even 5-dimensional grids. For example,
if a grid has the dimensions (parameter, time, depth, latitude, longitude), a map can be
selected by using: ingridfile?varname(parameter,time,depth).
Since question marks, brackets and parentheses have special meanings on the command line,
escape these meanings by placing the full filename and suffix between quotes.
NATIVE BINARY FILES
For binary native GMT files the size of the GMT grid header block is hsize = 892 bytes,
and the total size of the file is hsize + nx * ny * item_size, where item_size is the size
in bytes of each element (1, 2, 4). Bit grids are stored using 4-byte integers, each
holding 32 bits, so for these files the size equation is modified by using ceil (nx / 32)
* 4 instead of nx. Note that these files are platform-dependent. Files written on Little
Endian machines (e.g., PCs) can not be read on Big Endian machines (e.g., most
workstations). Also note that it is not possible for GMT to determine uniquely if a 4-byte
grid is float or int; in such cases it is best to use the =ID mechanism to specify the
file format. In all cases a native grid is considered to be signed (i.e., there are no
provision for unsigned short ints or unsigned bytes). For header and grid details, see
App-file-formats.
GRID VALUES PRECISION
Regardless of the precision of the input data, GMT programs that create grid files will
internally hold the grids in 4-byte floating point arrays. This is done to conserve memory
and furthermore most if not all real data can be stored using 4-byte floating point
values. Data with higher precision (i.e., double precision values) will lose that
precision once GMT operates on the grid or writes out new grids. To limit loss of
precision when processing data you should always consider normalizing the data prior to
processing.
EXAMPLES
To extract the second layer from a 3-dimensional grid named temp from a COARDS-compliant
netCDF file climate.nc:
gmt grdconvert climate.nc?temp[1] -Gtemp.nc -V
To create a 4-byte native floating point grid from the COARDS-compliant netCDF file
data.nc:
gmt grdconvert data.nc -Gras_data.b4=bf -V
To make a 2-byte short integer file, scale it by 10, subtract 32000, setting NaNs to
-9999, do
gmt grdconvert values.nc -Gshorts.i2=bs+s10+o-32000+n-9999 -V
To create a Sun standard 8-bit rasterfile for a subset of the data file image.nc, assuming
the range in image.nc is 0-1 and we need 0-255, run
gmt grdconvert image.nc -R-60/-40/-40/-30 -Gimage.ras8=rb+s255 -V
To convert etopo2.nc to etopo2.i2 that can be used by grdraster, try
gmt grdconvert etopo2.nc -Getopo2.i2=bs -N -V
SEE ALSO
gmt.conf, gmt, grdmath, grdraster
COPYRIGHT
2018, P. Wessel, W. H. F. Smith, R. Scharroo, J. Luis, and F. Wobbe