h5r has been removed from CRAN "due to licensing problems"[1]. ncdf4 and rgdal use totally different formats. rhdf5 may not be the best library, but it seems

h5r has been removed from CRAN "due to licensing problems"[1]. ncdf4 and rgdal use totally different formats. rhdf5 may not be the best library, but it seems to be the only library. I don't think R support for HDF5 is "limited," I think it's just poorly implemented in a few ways (another is that you need a separate package to get 64-bit integer support, which is another problem with R in general). [1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/h5r/index.html http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/h5r/index.html