I need to make a script that processes a NetCDF file that contains 3 days of hourly forecast data from the norwegian meteorological office.

1. The NetCDF file contains various data I need (Precipitation,Tmperature,Wind etc).

2. The NetCDF file is in a lambert projection while I will need to project it into WGS84 UTM 32N.

3. Also I will need to resample from 2.5km (forecast inputs) to 1km(output) grid cells.

4. I need to save it into the IDRISI format .rst

PROBLEM! The original NetCDF is HUGE, covering the whole of scandinavia + neighbouring countries. Thus I will need a system that processes quick. 

I managed to do this already with ArcPy, but the process was too slow since for every hour timestep I needed to extract one by one the huge rasters, and only then could I clip them down.

Maybe in GDAL (in Pythn) there is a way to first clip at once the whole netcdf and then continue the processing with a smaller netcdf?