How to write NetCDF with time as type 'int' not 'int64'

[mankoff]

I'm writing a NetCDF file and checking for CF compliance. I am getting the following error:

§2.2 Data Types
* The variable time failed because the datatype is int64

Is there some way to make xarray write non-int64 time dimension?

[spencerkclark]

Yes, you may set the "dtype" encoding attribute of the time coordinate before writing it out to a file. E.g. this will encode the dates with a double precision datatype:

ds.time.encoding["dtype"] = "float64"
ds.to_netcdf("float64-time-coordinate.nc")

[mankoff]

Thank you - that works.

[spencerkclark]

Oh and if you want to encode it as an int you can use "int32" as the dtype (sorry I just noticed the title of your post).