mpas_tools.io.open_dataset

mpas_tools.io.open_dataset(filename, engine=None, logger=None, **kwargs)[source]

Open an xarray.Dataset from a NetCDF file, accounting for quirks specific to MPAS components. This is a thin wrapper around xarray.open_dataset() that selects the NetCDF engine from mpas_tools.io.default_engine when engine is not given.

Specifying an engine explicitly is important because xarray.open_dataset() otherwise sniffs the file for “magic bits” to auto-select a backend, and that probe can crash on NETCDF3_64BIT_DATA (CDF5) files. Setting mpas_tools.io.default_engine (e.g. to 'netcdf4') provides a single, process-wide way to avoid that crash without modifying every call site.

Parameters:

  • filename (str or path-like or file-like) – The path to the NetCDF file to open, passed on to xarray.open_dataset()

  • engine ({'netcdf4', 'scipy', 'h5netcdf'}, optional) – The library to use for reading the NetCDF file. The default is mpas_tools.io.default_engine, which can be modified but which defaults to None (xarray auto-selects the backend)

  • logger (logging.Logger, optional) – A logger to write messages to. Reserved for future diagnostics; no error recovery is performed because the CDF5 backend-sniffing failure is a hard crash that cannot be caught.

  • **kwargs – Additional keyword arguments passed on to xarray.open_dataset() (e.g. decode_times, decode_cf, mask_and_scale)

Returns:

ds (xarray.Dataset) – The opened dataset