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 coordinate system layer implements and extends the concepts in the Climate and Forecast Metadata Conventions.

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