Limitations of loading HDF5 files with xarray

August 9, 2019

xarray.open_dataset can open HDF5 files. However, unexpected HDF5 file layouts can cause Python to quietly crash without error message. This is true even with the minimum required versions of xarray, h5py and h5netcdf installed.

We don’t have a specific workaround for this other than to use h5py to build up an xarray Dataset variable-by-variable.