netcdf4-python copying variables from one netcdf file to another

This has arisen as a problem of converting NETCDF4 to NETCDF3_CLASSIC which is still used by some old software. I did try nc4tonc3 provided with netCDF4 but that one also wanted the input file in NETCDF4_CLASSIC format... That is why I wrote this little script to actually copy variables and dimensions. There were no attributes in the files, so I did not care to handle attributes.

From a comment by Nikolay Koldunov, there is a utility for this tasks nccopy ...

Summation along a dimension

Suppose you have a netcdf file with temporal data of say evaporation (in meters). And you want to know how much water evaporates during a year. And also you do not want to loose time writing a program for this. Fortunately we have NCO. I did the procedure for the ERA-Interim reanalysis file downloaded from the ECMWF site. I picked the year 1985. The header of the file looks like this:


Here is the description of the procedure that I used:

1. Calculate the mean of the variable along the specified dimension (time in my case).

   ~# ncra -d time,0,729 -v e evap-1985.nc mean_evap_1985.nc
   

   Here I was not sure whether I should take care of the scale_factor and add_offset. The answer is no, because nco takes care of it for you.
2. Then, since sum = mean * ntimes, I use the mean to get the sum. Minus is because of the model convention, they consider the flux negative if it is upwards.

   ~# ncap -O -s "e=-730*e" mean_evap_1985.nc sum_evap_1985.nc
   

3. So we have our resulting field in the file sum_evap_1985.nc, which can be viewed using ncview. The field looks as shown below. I do not know how to save the legend in ncview, so the figure is not very informative. The result corresponds to the means given by ECMWF: E-P and P.
   
   
   

Data source: "ECMWF ERA-Interim data used here have been obtained from the ECMWF data server."