Wrong times reported by "ncdump -t"

[rkouznetsov]

Reproducible with ncdump from

• netcdf library version 4.7.1 of Aug 31 2019 00:57:34
• netcdf library version 4.7.3 of Jan 23 2020 04:18:16

timebug.nc.gz

ncdump -t timebug.nc

reports times starting from midnight, while the first time is at 07Z.
Thank you!

[lesserwhirls]

I believe this is a duplicate of #1417.

[rkouznetsov]

Thank you! I would guess, it is not a duplicate, although, might be related. That one was caused by undesired conversion of UTC to local time. This one is about ignoring the time specification..

[lesserwhirls]

ncdump -t does not attempt to handle the time zone at all. I think the bug is that when the unit attribute parsing code encounters UTC, it sets the clock time to zero by mistake rather than simply dropping the timezone. See this comment (which appears to have a fix as well).

And now I see you had been involved in the conversation over on that issue - sorry about the duplicate info here!

I was able to take your example file and 1. drop UTC from the units string and get correct results (e.g. minutes since 2018-01-03 07:00:00), and 2. change UTC to MDT (or other string, e.g. minutes since 2018-01-03 07:00:00 ABCDEFG) and get correct results. I only see the bug when UTC is used.

[rkouznetsov]

Thank you! That report was also from me :), and I got an impression that it been closed already, so did not check it. Sorry. So it is the same bug. So far I have just forced 00Z for all reference times as a workaround...