NetCDF Operators

About NCO

The NCO toolkit manipulates and analyzes data stored in NetCDF-accessible formats, including DAP, HDF4, and HDF5. It exploits the geophysical expressivity of many CF (Climate & Forecast) metadata conventions, the flexible description of physical dimensions translated by UDUnits, the network transparency of OPeNDAP, the storage features (e.g., compression, chunking, groups) of HDF (the Hierarchical Data Format), and many powerful mathematical and statistical algorithms of GSL (the GNU Scientific Library). NCO is fast, powerful, and free.

For more information see nco.sourceforge.net.

Typical applications at BAW

Concatenation of several NetCDF files converted from boewrt.dat files into one cf-netcdf.nc file

1. Convert several boewrt.dat files using DATACONVERT to equivalent cf-netcdf.nc files (with identical dates and times);
2. With ncrcat several files can be concatenated into one cf-netcdf.nc file;
3. Typical post processors: NCANALYSE;
4. Example: ncrcat -h f1.nc f2.nc ... fn.nc result.nc (-h suppresses the modification or creation of a history attribute);
5. More information: ncrcat-netCDF-Record-Concatenator.

Citations

The recommended citations for NCO software are

1. Zender, C. S. (2008), Analysis of Self-describing Gridded Geoscience Data with netCDF Operators (NCO), Environ. Modell. Softw., 23(10), 1338-1342, doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2008.03.004.
2. Zender, C. S. (2014), netCDF Operator (NCO) User Guide, Version 4.4.8, http://nco.sf.net/nco.pdf.

Use the former when referring to overall design, purpose, and optimization of NCO, and use the latter when referring to specific features and/or the User Guide itself.

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Overview