.nc files are NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) files, and they're commonly used for detailed scientific data. You may come across them if you're delving deep into weather or climate data.
How to open a .nc file
To open a NetCDF file you need some special software. Several options are available, but a popular one is Panoply (from Nasa). It’s free to download and relatively easy to use.
To install Panoply: Go to the panoply download page and download the version you need. You will need Java (version 11 or higher) installed on your computer to be able to run panoply. You can download that on oracle.
Once you have panoply downloaded, you can open the files on there and plot them as graphs. Then navigate to the ‘Array’ tab and you will see all the data. You can also right-click on the data set and export it as a CSV (but it may be large for this).
How to use Panolpy:
Open the file you’re trying to open (you will prompted to pick one to open when you load the software). If you want to open more, you can go to file → open and open them from there.
Expand the file, yours will have different options to mine as this is just an example file (for sunshine duration hours across Europe), and right-click the data file you want to look at. I want to look at the sunshine hours.
You can try to export to CSV here, but my file was too large. Instead, go for for ‘create plot’.
Pick the option here which is best for you. I wanted to look at specific locations, so I wanted the longitude and latitude in the data, therefore I went for the first option.
Once the plot opens, click ‘Array’ to see the data.
In this example, I can pinpoint the specific longitude and latitude I want, and get the sunshine duration.
Note: I am not an expert on this software, so there may be better ways of extracting the data. If anyone is an expert and has some tips, feel free to reach out.