A C-language computer program accepts, as input, a set of scientific data and metadata from an Earth Observing System (EOS) satellite and converts the set from (1) the format in which it was created and delivered to (2) another format for processing and exchange of data on Earth. The first-mentioned format can be either HDF-EOS 2 or HDF-EOS 5 (“HDF” signifies “Hierarchical Data Format”). The second-mentioned format is netCDF (“CDF” signifies “Common Data Format”), which is an open-standard, machine-independent, self-describing format for scientific-data files. In the absence of this or a similar program, incompatibilities among the three file formats can cause loss of metadata upon conversion.