I have a .nc/netcdf file which is about 1GB in size. Trying to crop and make it smaller with the following code:
r <- terra::rast("myfile.nc")
r2 <- terra::crop(x = r, y=terra::ext(-79, -72, 0, 12.4))
fails in a 16GB RAM machine. By failing I mean it does not return any results in 15 minutes and freezes my RStudio session if I try to stop the running code. Thus I have no error message to post here.
What alternative to terra::crop() should I consider to use on netcdf files?
Dealing with (NetCDF) files with many layers (time steps) can be very slow when using (a standard approach with) GDAL, which is what terra uses.
There now is a faster approach, using the "multi-dimensional" interface like this
library(terra)
r <- rast("myfile.nc", md=TRUE)
r2 <- crop(r, ext(-79, -72, 0, 12.4))
Alternatively, you could the otherwise obsolete raster package for this:
library(raster)
r <- brick("myfile.nc")
r2 <- crop(r, extent(-79, -72, 0, 12.4))