Opening and visualizing a netCDF file in Python

Author: ORNL DAAC
Date: March 21, 2018
Contact for ORNL DAAC: uso@daac.ornl.gov

Keywords: Python, netCDF, CSV, visualization, SoilSCAPE, soil moisture

Overview

This tutorial demonstrates how to open and explore the netCDF file, visualize the data, and export to a comma-separated file (CSV). This tutorial is intended for the users with novice-level programming skills. However, it is expected that the users familiarize themselves with key aspects of netCDF climate and forecast (CF) metadata convention before starting the tutorials.

Source Data

The source data is a netCDF file (soil_moist_20min_Kendall_AZ_n1400.nc) consisting of volumetric root zone soil moisture data from a location in Kendall, Arizona, USA. This data was collected as a part of SoilSCAPE (Soil moisture Sensing Controller and oPtimal Estimator) project (https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1339)

Prerequisites

Python 2.7 or later. Python modules: netCDF4, numpy, pandas, matplotlib

Procedure

You can access the Jupyter Notebook here.