IMOS (Integrated Marine Observing System) is designed to be a fully integrated national array of observing equipments monitoring the open oceans and coastal marine environment around Australia, covering physical, chemical and biological variables. All IMOS data is freely and openly available through the IMOS Ocean Portal for the benefit of Australian marine and climate science as a whole.

Most of the IMOS data is stored as NetCDF files (cf http://www.unidata.ucar.edu for more information regarding NetCDF).

Many of IMOS data users aren't computer literate enough to be able to use the NetCDF file format from scratch. A wide range of tools is already available online to help NetCDF users, but there is also a need for users who don't know where to start to include NetCDF files in their workflow.

The purpose of the “IMOS user code library” is to provide a ready to go code solution to incorporate data from NetCDF files in their working environment, starting with a NetCDF parser.