Temporal statistics

nctoolkit has a number of built-in methods for calculating temporal statistics, all of which are prefixed with t: tmean, tmin, tmax, trange, tpercentile, tmedian, tvariance, tstdev and tcumsum.

These methods allow you to quickly calculate temporal statistics over specified time periods using the over argument.

By default the methods calculate the value over all time steps available. For example the following will calculate the temporal mean:

import nctoolkit as nc
ds = nc.open_data("sst.mon.mean.nc")
ds.tmean()

However, you may want to calculate, for example, an annual average. To do this we use over. This is a list which tells the function which time periods to average over. For example, the following will calculate an annual average:

ds.tmean(["year"])

If you are only averaging over one time period, as above, you can simply use a character string:

ds.tmean("year")

The possible options for over are “day”, “month”, “year”, and “season”. In this case “day” stands for day of year, not day of month.

In the example below we are calculating the maximum value in each month of each year in the dataset.

ds.tmax(["month", "year"])

Calculating rolling averages

nctoolkit has a range of methods to calcate rolling averages: rolling_mean, rolling_min, rolling_max, rolling_range and rolling_sum. These methods let you calculate rolling statistics over a specified time window. For example, if you had daily data and you wanted to calculate a rolling weekly mean value, you could do the following:

ds.rolling_mean(7)

If you wanted to calculated a rolling weekly sum, this would do:

ds.rolling_sum(7)

Calculating anomalies

nctoolkit has two methods for calculating anomalies: annual_anomaly and monthly_anomaly. Both methods require you to specify a baseline period to calculate the anomaly against. They require that you specify a baseline period showing the minimum and maximum years of the climatological period to compare against.

So, if you wanted to calculate the annual anomaly compared with a baseline period of 1950-1969, you would do this:

ds.annual_anomaly(baseline = [1950, 1969])

By default, the annual anomaly is calculated as the absolute difference between the annual mean in a year and the mean across the baseline period. However, in some cases this is not suitable. Instead you might want the relative change. In that case, you would do the following:

ds.annual_anomaly(baseline = [1950, 1969], metric = "relative")

You can also smooth out the anomalies, so that they are calculated on a rolling basis. The following will calculate the anomaly using a rolling window of 10 years.

ds.annual_anomaly(baseline = [1950, 1969], window = 10)

Monthly anomalies are calculated in the same way:

ds.monthly_anomaly(baseline = [1950, 1969]

Here the anomaly is the difference between the value in each month compared with the mean in that month during the baseline period.

Calculating climatologies

This means we can easily calculate climatologies. For example the following will calculate a seasonal climatology:

ds.tmean("season")

These methods allow partial matches for the arguments, which means you do not need to remember the precise argument each time. For example, the following will also calculate a seasonal climatology:

ds.tmean("Seas")

Calculating a climatological monthly mean would require the following:

ds.tmean("month")

and daily would be the following:

ds.tmean("day")

Calculating climatologies

This means we can easily calculate climatologies. For example the following will calculate a seasonal climatology:

ds.tmean("season")

Cumulative sums

We can calculate the cumulative sum as follows:

ds.tcumsum()

Please note that this can only calculate over all time periods, and does not accept an over argument.