>flexible enough that it's also becoming widely used in climate science.
For scientific instruments just the opposite took place in the 1990's with chromatography.
They adapted a climate file type for laboratory instrument use.
It was quite a saga but in a nutshell it was the manufacturers who well understood the benefit of a common file type once computers had taken enough of a hold. Most lab analyses didn't need a computer except for the most data-intensive, which could never wait and were being handled by mainframes or minis before the PC appeared. Only by those that could afford such costly investments like oil companies and drug companies. Which are some of the most desirable customers for instrumentation.
At the time HP's lab instrument division (spun off decades ago as part of Agilent) had the most agressive sales approach but if a potential customer was already entrenched with one of the few other vendors there was no efficient way to carry their past proprietary data forward into a new system.
So the vendors got together, formed the Analytical Instrument Association (AIA) and began work in earnest toward a common file type they could all agree on for data interchange, without having to abandon each of the file types they had developed earlier which remained in everyday use within their proprietary software.
Once this had been accomplished it would be more of a battle of the salespeople with one less (big) technical obstacle to overcome.
They ended up choosing a well-established extensible file type, netCDF, which was in wide use at NOAA without encumbrance. Tailored it to the task and after a number of years the new standard was almost complete. Major vendors were already supporting it.
Well, by that time HP had already become dominant so they stealthily lost interest for a while before pulling out of AIA completely.
Fortunately with no further progress in sight the whole thing was dropped in the lap of ASTM, where it has remained unchanged for over two decades. That is even more fortunate because hindsight has shown the difference between an ideal standard and a nonideal standard is that an ideal standard never changes, and this is one of the best examples. These are often referred to as CDF files even though that does not stand for Chromatography Data File, they were just named netCDF by the weather service during the mainframe days.
So for more than 20 years each PC chromatography data system has had the capability of handling AIA files for either input or output. The underlying proprietary files which each software package utilizes under the hood for real-time data acquisition may have some unique features, but the common netCDF interchange covers all the essential bases needed for post-processing. Anything less is sub-standard.
Only in the last few years has a major software package appeared which for the first time does not fully support CDF's and that is the latest offering from Agilent of all places.
It can only create optional CDF files from the data acquired by their own instruments, so far there is no allowance for inputting a standard CDF file for processing by their software any more.