Analyzing or producing higher-level gridded data products stored in the netCDF file format can be challenging for researchers not experienced with netCDF data. The first section of this webinar will provide an introduction to the netCDF file format. Tutorials, demonstrated in R, will provide methods to open, read, write, and plot data from netCDF data files, and export them to other formats.

The second section of the webinar will demonstrate tools available from NASA's Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) for working with the netCDF-formatted Daymet data. The Daymet dataset provides daily gridded meteorological variables over the North American continent at a 1 km x 1 km spatial resolution. Introductory level netCDF processing techniques will be demonstrated using netCDF Operators (NCO), Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), and Python, including operations that are of interest to ecological applications. These techniques, although demonstrated using Daymet data, should be broadly applicable to similarly structured data in netCDF file format.