The project homepage[2] is hosted by the Unidata program at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

Version 4.1 (2010) added support for C and Fortran client access to specified subsets of remote data via OPeNDAP.

Full backward compatibility in accessing old netCDF files and using previous versions of the C and Fortran APIs is supported.

The software libraries supplied by UCAR provide read-write access to netCDF files, encoding and decoding the necessary arrays and metadata.

An independent implementation, also developed and maintained by Unidata, is written in 100% Java, which extends the core data model and adds additional functionality.

An extension of netCDF for parallel computing called Parallel-NetCDF (or PnetCDF) has been developed by Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University.

Using the high-level netCDF data structures, the Parallel-NetCDF libraries can make use of optimizations to efficiently distribute the file read and write applications between multiple processors.

The Parallel-NetCDF package uses different, but similar APIs in Fortran and C. Parallel I/O in the Unidata netCDF library has been supported since release 4.0, for HDF5 data files.

Since each of these is accessed transparently through the NetCDF API, the NetCDF-Java library is said to implement a common data model for scientific datasets.

The identification of coordinate systems and data typing is ongoing, but users can plug in their own classes at runtime for specialized processing.