Why two netcdf module?

[wxguy]

Firstly, thank you creating such a wonderful scripts. Please don't call these scripts as old because it still does work. The output images/ charts created are really good looking.

I have noticed that you are using PyNio in certain scripts and python-netcdf for other scripts. The script which uses 'python-netcdf' works fine (plot_wrf_maps.py) and other scripts depend on 'PyNio' simply result in NIOError: Unable to open file or Segmentation fault (core dumped).

Therefore, can you please explain the reason for choosing 'PyNio'? Because I find it really hard to to even install 'PyNio' on my machine.

Then comes the second issue that when I tried to run the 'plot_wrf_upa.py' script after using from netCDF4 import Dataset the '*.nc file was able to read by the script but resulted in the following error:-

python2 ./plot_wrf_upa.py -e -v wind -f wrfout_.nc
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./plot_wrf_upa.py", line 63, in <module>
    u_wind_ms_ua = nc.variables['UU'][:, :, :, :-1]
KeyError: 'UU'

I believe that it is mainly due to the way variables are retrieved by 'PyNio' and 'python-netcdf.

Any help to solve this issue is really appreciated.

[lmadaus]

Thanks for the comments on this. You've found the exact reason I'm calling these scripts "old" as I have not used PyNio nor python-netcdf for several years now; the python-netCDF4 library has now become more or less standard for reading netCDF files. The library usage in those scripts is obsolete now.

I see that you used the netCDF4 library already; I would continue using that for those scripts. The upper-air scripts were meant to be used with WRF output that had been post-processed through the "p_interp" utility available from the WRF developers, which is why it assumes the upper-air winds are in the variable "UU" instead of "U" as they are in standard wrfout files. Again, these scripts are old and obsolete, as WRF can now directly output winds on pressure levels or you can interpolate them yourself fairly easily.