Here is code used to read/write a masked_array with the netCDF4 and xarray modules. As seen if you run the code, for 3 cases the masked_value is read as a np.nan. However, for the netcdf file written by netCDF4 and read by xarray, the masked_value is the default _FillValue of 9.96920997e+36.

I wonder if this is expected or if I am doing something wrong.

```python import xarray as xr import netCDF4 as nc import numpy as np import os data = np.ma.array([1.,2.], mask = [True, False])

create file with netcdf$

nc_file = 'ncfile.nc' if os.path.exists(nc_file): os.remove(nc_file) ds = nc.Dataset(nc_file, 'w') ds.createDimension('dim1', 2) var = ds.createVariable('data', 'f8', dimensions = ('dim1')) var[:] = data ds.close()

create file with xarray

da = xr.DataArray(data, name = 'data', dims = {'dim1':2}) nc_file = 'xrfile.nc' if os.path.exists(nc_file): os.remove(nc_file) da.to_netcdf(nc_file, 'w') da.close()

print('original data: {}'.format(data))

da = xr.open_dataset('ncfile.nc').data print('data from nc read by xr: {}'.format(da.values)) da = xr.open_dataset('xrfile.nc').data print('data from xr read by xr: {}'.format(da.values))

data = nc.Dataset('ncfile.nc').variables['data'][:] print('data from nc read by nc: {}'.format(da.values)) data = nc.Dataset('xrfile.nc').variables['data'][:] print('data from xr read by nc: {}'.format(da.values))

print('done')

``` Here is the output I get:

``` original data: [-- 2.0] data from nc read by xr: [9.96920997e+36 2.00000000e+00] data from xr read by xr: [nan 2.] data from nc read by nc: [nan 2.] data from xr read by nc: [nan 2.] done

```

Output of xr.show_versions()

# Paste the output here xr.show_versions() here INSTALLED VERSIONS ------------------ commit: None python: 3.6.6.final.0 python-bits: 64 OS: Darwin OS-release: 17.7.0 machine: x86_64 processor: i386 byteorder: little LC_ALL: None LANG: fr_CA.UTF-8 LOCALE: fr_CA.UTF-8 xarray: 0.10.8 pandas: 0.23.4 numpy: 1.15.1 scipy: 1.1.0 netCDF4: 1.4.1 h5netcdf: None h5py: None Nio: None zarr: None bottleneck: 1.2.1 cyordereddict: None dask: 0.19.2 distributed: None matplotlib: None cartopy: None seaborn: None setuptools: 40.2.0 pip: 18.0 conda: None pytest: 3.8.0 IPython: 7.0.1 sphinx: None