NCO Release 4.7.8

NCO’s New Release Helps CMIP6 Data Providers

The netCDF Operators (NCO) toolkit allows researchers to manipulate and analyze data stored in netCDF-accessible formats, including DAP, HDF4, and HDF5. Users can work with shell-commands or expressive scripts to manipulate gridded and unstructured scientific data interactively.

The new stable Version 4.7.8 “Paradise Lost” contains many improvements to help convert Earth System Model output into CMIP6 timeseries format. In particular, ncclimo coordinates better with ncremap when processing MPAS data and regridding. Both can take advantage of ncpdq’s new feature to convert doubles to floats, and raw binary output can now be byte-swapped to ease creation of offline datasets for some models like WRF and CICE.

Thanks to the new release, the NCO is now used in the process of translating E3SM output files into the CMIP6 compliant E3SM files. Also, many E3SM Diagnostic tools rely on NCO. In particular the MPAS Analysis and E3SM Processflow packages directly use NCO for E3SM climatology generation, regridding, and time-series variable extraction. The NCO output files are used as input for the AMWG, E3SM Diagnostics, and E-prime Diagnostic packages. Additionally, the AMWG, E3SM Diagnostics, and A-PRIME Diagnostics packages compare E3SM simulations against observational climatologies that were largely formatted, annotated, climatologized, and regridded with NCO. E3SM simulations input to iLAMB are also typically regridded with NCO. Hence NCO is a core component of  E3SM Tools and is automatically loaded within the E3SM Unified Conda environment, and can also be individually installed.

NCO Links

• NCO
• Users Guide: HTML, PDF
• Code Repository: http://github.com/nco/nco
• Code Citation: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.595745

Contact:

• Charlie Zender
• University of California, Irvine