Climate Data Operators – Kai Lochbihler

Download German rain radar data and convert it to NetCDF (or what they should provide in the first place)

For a private project, I wanted to have a look at the German radar archive. I found that they have quasi-calibrated 5-minute precipitation data on a 1km² grid available in the public domain. So, let’s download and process the data set, so that it is easier to use for further data analysis.

This post is part of the germanRADARanalysis project. All code is available on G itHub.

How to process many gridded climate data files in parallel with find, xargs and cdo

Climate data often comes in the format of NetCDF and most of the time we have to deal with a large number of files. For instance, when they are split into one file per year. So, what can we do if we want to process all files in the same way?

Luckily, there are tools to accomplish this task easily and even improve the performance by parallel execution. Here, I will show you a simple way to do this. In this example, I will download a small part of a global climate data set and extract a region from it. It’s just a one-liner.