ACCESS data products are available in GRIB-2 (grb2) and/or netCDF-4 (nc4) format. The nc4 files contain additional information not available via the grib formatted file. For example:
// global attributes: :Conventions = "CF-1.5" ; :source = "Australian Bureau of Meteorology" ; :modl_vrsn = "ACCESS-G" ;
NCL's ncl_filedump can be used to examine the contents of either file format.
As a side point, the default behavior of NCL for a grib formatted file with one time step, is to not explicitly include a time dimension. NCL can be forced to explicitly include the time dimension.
On the command line use: %> ncl_filedump -itime foo.grb2 Within an NCL script, the setfileoption procedure can be used (See Example 2). setfileoption("grb","SingleElementDimensions","Initial_time")