Investigate ncrcat for combining stats files?

[nordam]

The command line tool ncrcat can combine netcdf files along a record dimension (commonly time). If we defined the dimension "index" as a record dimension, and made sure it was increasing across files, we could use ncrcat. Not sure if this would be faster than using open_mfdataset, but maybe worth looking into? Note that it would require different threads to somehow keep, and syncronise, a running particle count, so it might not be feasible in practice.

[nepstad]

Version 2.5.11 introduced a new method for merging netcdf files which should solve the merge speed issue. Particle counts are available in the image_stats group in the netcdf files.