Climate Data Operator (CDO) command line tool


CDO is a collection of command line Operators to manipulate and analyse Climate and NWP model Data.

Supported data formats are GRIB 1/2, netCDF 3/4, SERVICE, EXTRA and IEG. There are more than 600 operators available for data information, manipulation, formatting, and analysis. Documentation, source code and a support forum is available from the official website.


Using CDO under Linux:

  • install from system repositories, e.g in Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install cdo, or or
  • Compile source package

Using CDO under MacOS:

Using CDO under Windows:

  • Install WSL for Windows as described here and install cdo from repositories as described above
  • Cygwin:
  1. download http://cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe or http://cygwin.com/setup-x86.exe depending on your operating system. for more documentation, have a look at this: https://cygwin.com/faq.html
  2. run it and install the packages mentioned at Win32
  3. this will put new icons on your desktop - the cygwin shell, where cdo will be run from
  4. download and extract https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/attachments/download/16057/cdo-1.9.2-cygwin64.zip - and put the binary under C:\cygwin\usr\bin
  5. start the cygwin shell and type cdo -V