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.
