Hi All,

this tet explain a little bit my experience in converting the NCEP Reanalysis 
made avaiable by NCDC center through his site (ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis)
in NetCDF format.
I used LATS interface and GrADS here (Believe me, its easy to use after some days of work...), so
I recomend you to download that before to try something.


If you are reading that aiming to use those data to run REGRID (MM5 module), you can
use the commands below to download all the necessary files. Be sure you had wget 
software installed.

wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/surface_gauss/air.2m.gauss.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/surface_gauss/shum.2m.gauss.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/surface_gauss/skt.sfc.gauss.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/surface_gauss/uwnd.10m.gauss.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/surface_gauss/vwnd.10m.gauss.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/pressure/air.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/pressure/hgt.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/pressure/rhum.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/pressure/uwnd.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/pressure/vwnd.2003.nc 
wget ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/surface/slp.2003.nc 

After that create the table files so LATS can understand and convert the files
according. No, I will not leave sugar in your mouth... You can find the files
that I've been using in http://acd.ufrj.br/~ricardom/mm5/reanalysis.lev and
http://acd.ufrj.br/~ricardom/mm5/reanalysis.sfc 
I splitted these files by levels vars and surface vars.

Now you can run lats interface... or you can download my shell scripts, yes there are
two. One of those (convertsplit.sh - http://acd.ufrj.br/~ricardom/mm5/convertsplit.sh)
is the simple one and just convert from NetCDF to GRIB to a specif time period, and 
another one (convertall.sh - http://acd.ufrj.br/~ricardom/mm5/convertall.sh) is more 
complex and split (I know, the names don't make so much sense...) the files in gauss, 
level, sfc and sst files, and in analyse hours.
There are comments in both of then (in english) so you can easily figure out what
those parameters means.
I think that Mike Fiorino (one of the GrADS Developers) has a DODS script that
download just a specif time period from CDC.

Thats All Folks, enjoy!