The software suite, named "Operators", consists of a collection of programs designed to perform specific functions.
NCO follows a single command style which allows users to manipulate and analyze files interactively and with simple scripts, avoiding the overhead (and some of the power) of a higher level programming environment. The NCO User's Guide illustrates the use of these operators with examples from the field of climate modeling and analysis. However, it's important to note that the "averagers" are misnamed because they perform many non-linear operations as well, such as total, minimum, maximum, and RMS.
The operators included in the NCO package are the ncap and ncap2 netCDF Arithmetic Processors, ncatted netCDF Attribute Editor, ncbo netCDF Binary Operator (includes ncadd, ncsubtract, ncmultiply, and ncdivide), ncea netCDF Ensemble Averager, ncecat netCDF Ensemble Concatenator, ncflint netCDF File Interpolator, ncks netCDF Kitchen Sink, ncpdq netCDF Permute Dimensions Quickly, Pack Data Quietly, ncra netCDF Record Averager, ncrcat netCDF Record Concatenator, ncrename netCDF Renamer, and ncwa netCDF Weighted Averager.
The operators are as general as netCDF itself, with no restrictions on the contents of the netCDF file(s) used as input. NCO's internal routines are completely dynamic and impose no limit on the number or sizes of dimensions, variables, and files. NCO is designed to be used both interactively and with large batch jobs.
NCO's default operator behavior is often sufficient for everyday needs, and there are numerous command line options available for special cases. NCO works well on all modern operating systems, including Apple OS X, *BSD, Cray UNICOS, DEC Tru64, IBM AIX, HPUX, Linux, Microsoft Windows, NEC Super UX, SGI IRIX, and Sun Solaris.
Version 3.9.7: N/A