Introduction to nctoolkit

nctoolkit is a multi-purpose tool for analyzing and post-processing netCDF files. 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 learn about here.

Here we will use monthly average temperature for the years 1991-2020 and extract data using a thredds server.

The preferred way to import nctoolkit is:

import nctoolkit as nc

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_thredds("https://psl.noaa.gov/thredds/dodsC/Datasets/COBE2/sst.mon.ltm.1991-2020.nc")
ds.plot()