# Introduction

CF is a netCDF convention which is in wide and growing use for the storage of model-generated and observational data relating to the atmosphere, ocean and Earth system.

This package is an implementation of the CF data model, and as such its API allows for the full scope of data and metadata interactions described by the CF conventions.

With this package you can:

> - Read CF-netCDF files, CFA-netCDF files and UK Met Office fields files and PP files.
> - Create CF fields.
> - Write fields to CF-netCDF and CFA-netCDF files on disk.
> - Aggregate collections of fields into as few multidimensional fields as possible using the CF aggregation rules.
> - Create, delete and modify a field’s data and metadata.
> - Select and subspace fields according to their metadata.
> - Perform broadcastable, metadata-aware arithmetic, comparison and trigonometric operation with fields.
> - Collapse fields by statistical operations.
> - Sensibly deal with date-time data.
> - Allow for cyclic axes.
> - Visualize fields the cf-plot package.

All of the above use Large Amounts of Massive Arrays (LAMA) functionality, which allows multiple fields larger than the available memory to exist and be manipulated.

See the cf-python home page for downloads, installation and source code.