Introduction to nctoolkit

nctoolkit is a multi-purpose tool for analyzing and post-processing netCDF files. It is designed to carry out almost all analysis and post-processing chains, and to do so easily and efficiently. It is designed explicitly with climate change and oceanographic work in mind. Under the hood, it uses Climate Data Operators (CDO), but it operates as a stand-alone package with no knowledge of CDO being required to use it.

Let’s look at what it can do using a historical global dataset of sea surface temperature, which you can find here.

The preferred way to import nctoolkit is:

import nctoolkit as nc

nctoolkit is using Climate Data Operators version 1.9.10

It lets you quickly visualize data

nctoolkit offers plotting functionality that will let you automatically plot data from almost any type of netCDF file. It’s as simple as the following, which calculates mean historical sea surface temperature and then plots it:

ds = nc.open_data("sst.mon.mean.nc")
ds.plot()