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NetCDF can be used as a general-purpose archive format for storing arrays. Compression of data is possible with netCDF (e.g., using arrays of eight-bit or 16-bit integers to encode low-resolution floating-point numbers instead of arrays of 32-bit numbers), but the current version of netCDF was not designed to achieve optimal compression of data. Hence, using netCDF may require more space than special-purpose archive formats that exploit knowledge of particular characteristics of specific datasets.