Tools to explore netCDF files

Here is a non exhaustive list of tools/software you can use to post-process and visualize netCDF files:

CDO (Climate Data Operators)

CDO is a collection of command-line operators to manipulate and analyze climate and numerical weather prediction data and can manipulate model outputs (netCDF). CDO provides more than 350 operators!

• CDO (Climate Data operators) Documentation
• CDO Reference Card
• CDO Tutorial

NCO (netCDF Operators)

NCO is a suite of programs designed to perform certain "operations" on netCDF files, i.e., things like averaging, concatenating, subsetting, or metadata manipulation.

• NCO (netCDF Operator website)
• NCO CMIP5 examples

Ncview: a netCDF visual browser

Ncview is one of the simplest visual browser for netCDF format files. If you want to learn more about ncview:

• See a screenshot of ncview in action.
• Quick introduction: Everything you need to know to get working in 5 minutes.

Python programming language

Python is a general purpose programming and scripting language which includes powerful visualisation and data analysis tools. Matplotlib is a general purpose plotting library gioving Python the power of MatLab. NetCDF files can be read using the NetCDF4 library and/or Xarray. The most common distribution of Python for scientific use is the Anaconda distribution.

Useful Shell command (loops, etc.)

For more information see the Software Carpentry shell lesson.