title: Use NCEP/NOAA .bin file in R
body: <p>I am trying to read .bin files from NOAA (<a href="ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/wd53rl/cfsr/" rel="nofollow">ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/wd53rl/cfsr/</a>) using R version 2.14.0 on a PC. 
  When I read the files using the function readBin, the values are very high (from 1e16 to 9e16) while they should not be higher than 330. </p>
  
  <p>I wrote the code below to download the .zip file containing the information (Note: the number 20130422 is related 
  to the date, thus another date may be available). </p>
  
  <pre><code>    file.name &lt;- 'Data.zip' 
      file.URL &lt;- 'ftp://ftp.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/wd53rl/cfsr/cargill.20130422.zip' 
      download.file(file.URL,file.name) 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I unzipped the files manually and used the one with max temperature data (tmax.20130422.daily.latlon.bin)   </p>
  
  <p>Then, I wrote a code to read the max temperature file (720*720 is the number of rows and columns I want to read): </p>
  
  <pre><code>    to.read &lt;- 'tmax.20130422.daily.latlon.bin' 
      bin &lt;- readBin(to.read, what = 'numeric',n = 720*720,endian='little') 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have tried to use different "endian" or "what", but nothing worked for me. How can I extract the right values from the bin file? </p>
  
  <p>Thanks, 
  Eduardo</p>