Pure Python NetCDF file reading and writing.

Inspired by the pyshp library, which provides simple pythonic and dependency free data access to vector data, I wanted to create a library for an increasingly popular file format in the raster part of the GIS world, namely, NetCDF. From landuse to climate data, data sought after by GIS practioners are increasingly often found only in the NetCDF format.

My problem was that existing NetCDF libraries for python all rely on interfacing with underlying C based implementations and can be hard to setup outside the context of a full GDAL stack.

But most of the complexity of the format is in reading the metadata in the header, which makes it easy to implement in python and should not have to suffer from the slowness of python. Reading the actual data, which NetCDF can store a lot of, is where one might argue that a C implementation is needed for reasons of speed. But given that the main purpose of the format data model is to provide efficient access to any part of its vast data without having to read all of it via byte offset pointers, this too can be easily and relatively efficiently implemented in python without significant slowdowns. Besides, in many cases, the main use of NetCDF is not for storing enormously vast raster arrays, but rather for storing multiple relatively small raster arrays on different themes, and of providing variations of these across some dimension, such as time.

All of this makes it feasible and desirable with a pure python implementation for reading and writing NetCDF files, expanding access to the various data sources now using this format to a much broader set of users and applications, especially in portable environments.

Basic metadata and data extraction functional, but has not been tested very extensively, so likely to contain some issues. No file writing implemented yet. Only Classic and 64-bit formats supported so far, though NetCDF-4 should be easy to implement.

Documentation is so far a little sparse, so how about some basic examples.

Basically, you load some data file which allows access to its meta data in the "header" attribute, a dictionary structure based exactly on the format specification, which you will just have to explore for now:

import pyncf
ncfile = pyncf.NetCDF(filepath="somefile.nc")
headerdict = ncfile.header

For more intuitive access to metadata there are also some more specific methods for that, all retrieving dictionaries:

ncfile.get_dimensions()
nc.get_diminfo("time")

ncfile.get_nonrecord_variables()
ncfile.get_record_variables()
nc.get_varinfo("temperature")

When it comes to actual data retrieval, there are two main methods. One for reading a dimension's index values if defined in a variable, and another for retrieving a 2d list of lists of a multidimensional variable's data values, by specifying which two dimensions to get your data for and fixing all remaining dimensions at a certain value:

timelabels = ncfile.read_dimension_values("time")
datamatrix = ncfile.read_2d_data(ydim="latitude", xdim="longitude", time=43)

Karim Bahgat, 2016

Based on the file format description at: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/file_format_specifications.html

• First alpha version