I am following the accepted answer for the question: Batch converting netCDF to Raster using ArcPy?, obviously, to convert netcdfs. The code taken from the above answer (pasted below) works fine on a single NetCDF. However, if I run the same function on many .nc files by making inNetCDF variable a parameter, ArcMap breaks down. It crashes with ArcGIS 10.1 and hangs with ArcGIS 10.2.2 (on two different machines) after generating about 500 or 600 images.

I suspected that the issue is that ArcMap can't handle this many layers (more than 1000 considering the extracted nc layers). So I added:

      arcpy.env.addOutputsToMap = False

to forbid adding output to the content index, but the crashes still remain.

So my questions are:

1. Is it possible to run the involved ArcToolbox functions like CopyRaster_management outside of ArcMap from command line python?

2. If not, how to avoid the crash problem?

Thanks.

--code--

def extractAllNetCDF():
    
    variable = "RRt_10m"
    x_dimension = "lon"
    y_dimension = "lat"
    band_dimension = ""
    dimension = "time"
    valueSelectionMethod = "BY_VALUE"
    
    outLoc = "E:/New Folder/"
    inNetCDF = "E:/netCDFFiles/RRt.nc"
    
    nc_FP = arcpy.NetCDFFileProperties(inNetCDF)
    nc_Dim = nc_FP.getDimensions()

    for dimension in nc_Dim:
        top = nc_FP.getDimensionSize(dimension)
        for i in range(0, top):
            if dimension == "time":
                
                dimension_values = nc_FP.getDimensionValue(dimension, i)
                nowFile = str(dimension_values)

                #THIS IS THE NEW CODE HERE
                dv1 = ["time", dimension_value]
                dimension_values = [dv1]
                #END NEW CODE
                
                arcpy.MakeNetCDFRasterLayer_md(inNetCDF, variable, x_dimension, y_dimension, nowFile, band_dimension, dimension_values, valueSelectionMethod)
                arcpy.CopyRaster_management(nowFile, outLoc + nowFile + ".img", "", "", "", "NONE", "NONE", "")
                print dimension_values, i 

-- Update --

Thanks everyone. Here's the outcome using python from the command line. The script works well except for needing a few imports like arcpy and sys. There was still a crash, but the number of processed images increased 10 fold to about 7000. This time, memory seems to be at issue, with 1.8G consumed before the crash. I am trying the 64 bit background processing as suggested.