WRF Output in MAPLOTLIB using GDAL

[kdeblois]

Does anyone have an idea how I could extract global attributes from wrfout using the gdal library, or some other way?

I am getting my datasets without difficulty using gdal.Open('NETCDF:"'+wrf_out_file+'":T2') I need to be able to extract info on start date and time steps for use in my plot labels.