Installing and Using netCDF-C Libraries in Windows

Table of Contents

• Getting pre-built netCDF-C Libraries for Visual Studio
  • Included Dependencies
  • Latest Release (netCDF-C 4.8.1)
• Using the netCDF-C Libraries with Visual Studio
  • Install Hierarchy
• Notes

NetCDF-C Libraries in a Windows Environment may be used under multiple sets of circumstances.

There are several development environments available for programmers who develop on Windows.

• Microsoft Visual Studio
• MSYS/MinGW
• Cygwin

For developers using Microsoft Visual Studio, you may download using the Windows build instructions, or you may download the pre-built netCDF-C libraries from this page.

For developers using MSYS/MinGW or Cygwin, you may build netCDF-C using the Linux/Unix build instructions.

For complex builds that include netCDF-4 and/or DAP support this may prove tricky, as it is time consuming to collect all of the dependencies. In these cases it may be easier to use the pre-built netcdf packages provided by the MSYS and Cygwin environments.

Users who prefer to build the netCDF-C libraries from source in a Windows environment using Microsoft Visual Studio are referred to Build Instructions for NetCDF-C using CMake

Getting pre-built netCDF-C Libraries for Visual Studio

These libraries have been built using Visual Studio 2017. The downloads are installer packages which contain the netCDF-C libraries and utilities (ncgen, ncgen3, ncdump and nccopy), as well as the associated dependencies.

Included Dependencies

The included dependencies and versions are as follows:

• libhdf5: 1.8.19
• libcurl: 7.55.1
• zlib: 1.2.8

Latest Release (netCDF-C 4.8.1)

Configuration	32-bit	64-bit
netCDF 3	netCDF4.8.1-NC3-32.exe	netCDF4.8.1-NC3-64.exe
netCDF3+DAP	netCDF4.8.1-NC3-DAP-32.exe	netCDF4.8.1-NC3-DAP-64.exe
netCDF4	netCDF4.8.1-NC4-32.exe	netCDF4.8.1-NC4-64.exe
netCDF4+DAP	netCDF4.8.1-NC4-DAP-32.exe	netCDF4.8.1-NC4-DAP-64.exe

Using the netCDF-C Libraries with Visual Studio

In order to use the netcdf libraries, you must ensure that the .dll files (along with any dependencies from deps/shared/bin) are on the system path. In order to compile a program using these libraries, you must first link your program against the appropriate 'import' (.lib) libraries.

Install Hierarchy

When installed, the netCDF libraries are placed in the specified locations, along with the netCDF-C utilities and dependencies.

Notes

The following points should be considered when using the netCDF-C libraries on Windows.

1. When building the netCDF-C libraries with netCDF4 support, using the Debug libraries may cause extraneous warnings. These warnings are related to cross-dll memory management, and appear to be harmless. You can safely ignore them by using the Release libraries. [NCF-220]