The code to determine the type of file could be improved. We need to be able to check if a file is NetCDF or grib(2) so we can format the MET config field info appropriately. NetCDF files generated by MET also need to be formatted in a specific way. MET has code to check file types. We should investigate if it is feasible to use this C++ code in the python wrappers. We could also create a utility application that uses this C++ code that can be run via command line to determine the file type.

The user can set the data type for data directories in the config files to avoid the need to check the file type. We could potentially set these config items automatically for MET output directories so that METplus wrapper run after can get this information.