thanks for all your responses. I think I have FINALLY worked it out with all of your help.
I just assigned one array from one ncfile to "a" at the beginning of my code and then ran the loop and it worked!!
sorry for all the questions but I learn so much playing and getting ideas from others.
Thanks again. code below for anyone else that needs to do the same.

onefile=Dataset("E:/01/IDZ00026_T_SFC.nc", 'r+', 'NETCDF4')
oneTSFC=onefile.variables['T_SFC'][:]
a=oneTSFC[0]

for (path, dirs, files) in os.walk(MainFolder):
    for dir in dirs:
        print dir
    path=path+'/'
    for ncfile in files:
        if ncfile[-3:]=='.nc':
            ncfile=os.path.join(path,ncfile)
            ncfile=Dataset(ncfile, 'r+', 'NETCDF4')
            TSFC=ncfile.variables['T_SFC'][:]
            ncfile.close()
            for b in TSFC[:]:
                    N.maximum(a,b, out=a)
 print a
          



On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 4:11 PM, Derek Homeier <derek@astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de> wrote:
On 07.12.2011, at 5:54AM, questions anon wrote:

> sorry the 'all_TSFC' is for my other check of maximum using concatenate and N.max, I know that works so I am comparing it to this method. The only reason I need another method is for memory error issues.
> I like the code I have written so far as it makes sense to me. I can't get the extra examples I have been given to work and that is most likely because I don't understand them, these are the errors I get :
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "d:\plot_summarystats\test_plot_remove_memoryerror_max.py", line 46, in <module>
>     N.maximum(a,TSFC,out=a)
> ValueError: non-broadcastable output operand with shape (106,193) doesn't match the broadcast shape (721,106,193)
>
> and
>
OK, then it seems we did not indeed grasp the entire scope of the problem -
since you have initialised a from the previous array TSFC (not from TSFC[0]?!), this can
only mean the arrays read in come in different shapes? I don't quite understand how the
previous version did not raise an error then; but if you only want the (106,193)-subarray
you have indeed to keep the loop
          for b in TSFC[:]:
               N.maximum(a,b,out=a)

But you would have to find some way to distinguish between ndim=2 and ndim=3 input,
if really both can occur...
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "d:\plot_summarystats\test_plot_remove_memoryerror_max.py", line 45, in <module>
>     if not instance(a, N.ndarray):
> NameError: name 'instance' is not defined
>
Sorry, typing error (or devious auto-correct?) - this should be 'isinstance()'

Cheers,
                                               Derek

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