The best way to install NCPlot is with conda — this pulls in cartopy automatically, which some plots use for coastlines and map projections.
conda install -c conda-forge ncplot
Install the stable release from PyPI:
pip install ncplot
The PyPI package does not include the optional cartopy dependency. Some plots will look better with it installed — see the cartopy installation guide if you install via pip.
Once installed, plotting a netCDF file is a single function call. This example plots sea surface temperature from NOAA's COBE2 dataset, streamed directly from a remote OPeNDAP server — no download required:
from ncplot import view url = "https://psl.noaa.gov/thredds/dodsC/Datasets/COBE2/sst.mon.ltm.1981-2010.nc" view(url, vars="sst", coast=True)
This opens an interactive plot of sea surface temperature, with coastlines drawn in. Here's the actual output — pan, zoom and hover on it below:
Continue with the quickstart to see the xarray accessor and the command line viewer.
