Controlling the time format parsing.
When addXML looks at a netCDF data source it attempts to parse the time units string using a few standard patterns. Specifically either yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ or yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss. Rather than try guess or come up with an exhaustive list of format patterns we added an option to addXML to allow you to coach the software as to the format pattern used. You can enter the pattern using the [(-u|--units_format) <units_format>] option.
Controlling the time format printing.
Sometimes addXML prints out all of the detail for information about the time axis. If you find that the time strings aren't to your liking you can change how a time string is formatted by using the [(-f|--format) <format>].
Controlling the output for an irregular axis.
Some data sets might contain an axis with irregularly space points. This often happens with the time axis. Initially, addXML will faithfully use the construct in the configuration which lists each and every point in the irregular axis. For a long time axis the user interface will present the exhaustive list of available time steps which can be quite cumbersome for users.. You can force addXML to ignore the fact that the axis is irregular by using the [(-a|--arange)[:arange1,arange2,...,arangeN ]] option. For example to force this treatment for the time axis use -a:t. For both time and the vertical level use -a:t,z. This will allow users to select time using the standard widgets. If the time of a missing time step is requested, LAS will return data either from the nearest available timestep, or will interpolate between time steps. This setting can be configured for the dataset in its xml configuration, or may be set by the user in the Plot Options menus of the UI.
Grouping multiple netCDF data sources into one LAS <dataset> element.
Sometimes a data provider will organize different data variables from the same data set into multiple files. You can automatically add all of these netCDF data sources into the same LAS data set by using the -d option ([(-d|--dataset)[:<dataset>]]) and listing each netCDF data source on the same command line with -n file1.nc -n file2.nc and so on.