netCDF4 Files Creation and Conventions

The Salish Sea MEOPAR project uses netCDF4 files as input for the NEMO model and for other purposes, where appropriate. The netCDF4 Files Creation and Conventions section in the project tools documentation documents the recommended way of creating netCDF4 files with compression of varibles, limitation of variables to appropriate precision, and appropriate metadata attributes for the variables and the dataset as a whole. The recommendations are based on the NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions, Version 1.6, 5 December, 2011. Use of the netCDF4-python library (included in Anaconda Python Distribution) is assumed.

The nc_tools Module in the SalishSeaTools Package is a library of Python functions for exploring and managing the attributes of netCDF files.