2021-01-19T08:21 AM
Picking the right tool for the job really depends on what you are trying to accomplish: from what I understand you would like to get the values as readable text while keeping them formatted like a table, maybe something like an Excel document?
Also note that some tools may be exclusive to an operating system (OS) or made easier to install for a specific OS, so you may want to choose the tools that are well supported by your OS if you are not very comfortable with installing programs that require some tweaks to get working.
If your are not used to programming and prefer tools with a graphical interface, installing Panoply (https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/panoply/download/) would probably be a good choice: it should be able to open the NetCDF files and it has an "Export" feature that will let you convert the files to a textual format (CSV or labelled text table).
If you prefer command-line tools NCO and CDO should be able to convert NetCDF files into CSV. Another thing you may want to try is to install NetCDF4 on your OS: it usually comes with a command-line utility called `ncdump` that you can use to print the content of .nc files in a console/terminal.
The content of a NetCDF file can be quite verbose so it might be easier to redirect the output of the command to a text file that you can then inspect in the editor of your choice. To do so, open a terminal or a console and execute the following command:
ncdump path_to_netcdf_file.nc > output.txt
where you must replace path_to_netcdf_file.nc by the actual path of your NetCDF file. Opening output.txt in a text editor will let you see how data are structured inside the NetDF file and access the values of each variable.
You may notice some values are replaced by _: this is the way NetCDF represents cells whose value is either missing or has been masked for some reason.
Finally, if you are familiar with Python I can provide a short code example showing how you can open a NetCDF file and access the content of its variables.
Also note that some tools may be exclusive to an operating system (OS) or made easier to install for a specific OS, so you may want to choose the tools that are well supported by your OS if you are not very comfortable with installing programs that require some tweaks to get working.
If your are not used to programming and prefer tools with a graphical interface, installing Panoply (https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/panoply/download/) would probably be a good choice: it should be able to open the NetCDF files and it has an "Export" feature that will let you convert the files to a textual format (CSV or labelled text table).
If you prefer command-line tools NCO and CDO should be able to convert NetCDF files into CSV. Another thing you may want to try is to install NetCDF4 on your OS: it usually comes with a command-line utility called `ncdump` that you can use to print the content of .nc files in a console/terminal.
The content of a NetCDF file can be quite verbose so it might be easier to redirect the output of the command to a text file that you can then inspect in the editor of your choice. To do so, open a terminal or a console and execute the following command:
ncdump path_to_netcdf_file.nc > output.txt
where you must replace path_to_netcdf_file.nc by the actual path of your NetCDF file. Opening output.txt in a text editor will let you see how data are structured inside the NetDF file and access the values of each variable.
You may notice some values are replaced by _: this is the way NetCDF represents cells whose value is either missing or has been masked for some reason.
Finally, if you are familiar with Python I can provide a short code example showing how you can open a NetCDF file and access the content of its variables.