Importing and exporting data

nctoolkit can work with data available on local file systems, urls and over thredds and OPeNDAP.

Opening single files and ensembles

If you want to import a single netCDF file as a dataset, do the following:

import nctoolkit as nc
ds = nc.open_data(infile)

The open_data function can also import multiple files. This can be done in two ways. If we have a list of files we can do the following:

import nctoolkit as nc
ds = nc.open_data(file_list)

Alternatively, open_data is capable of handling wildcards. So if we have a folder called data, we can import all files in it as follows:

import nctoolkit as nc
ds = nc.open_data("data/*.nc")

Opening files from urls/ftp

If we want to work with a file that is available at a url or ftp, we can use the open_url function. This will start by downloading the file to a temporary folder, so that it can be analysed.

import nctoolkit as nc
ds = nc.open_url(www.foo.nc)

Opening data available over thredds servers or OPeNDAP

If you want to work with data that is available over a thredds server or OPeNDAP, you can use the open_thredds method. This will require that the url ends with “.nc”.

import nctoolkit as nc
ds = nc.open_thredds(www.foo.nc)

Exporting datasets

nctoolkit has a number of built in methods for exporting data to netCDF, pandas dataframes and xarray datasets.

Save as a netCDF

The method to_nc lets users export a dataset to a netCDF file. If you want this to be a zipped netCDF file use the zip method before to to_nc. An example of usage is as follows:

ds = nc.open_data(infile)
ds.tmean()
ds.zip()
ds.to_nc(outfile)

Convert to pandas dataframe

The method to_dataframe lets users export a dataset to a pandas dataframe.

ds = nc.open_data(infile)
ds.tmean()
df = ds.to_dataframe()

Interacting with xarray datasets

If you want to move between nctoolkit and xarray dataset, you can use from_xarray and to_xarray.

The method to_xarray lets users export a dataset to an xarray dataset. An example of usage is as follows:

ds = nc.open_data(infile)
ds.tmean()
xr_ds = ds.to_xarray()

If you want to convert an xarray dataset to an nctoolkit dataset, you can just the from_xarray function, as follows:

Exporting subsets of data

If you want to only export a subset of the data you can do this by providing additional args to the to_nc, to_xarray and to_dataframe methods. These args will then be sent to the subset method.

For example, if you only wanted to export the year 2000 to xarray, you would do the following:

ds.to_xarray(year = 2000)

Or if you wanted a spatial subset of the data you could do this:

ds.to_xarray(lon = [0, 90], lat = [0, 90])