How to open/display and extract NetCDF files info?

We don't encounter them much except out of the Bureau of Meteorology. When we do I tend to use the Panoply netCDF, HDF and GRIB Data Viewer from NASA to initially view the data, and then the Python netcdf4-python library to actually interact with the data - (also using scipy, numpy, etc. for calculations).

As for extrcting time series data, it tends to be for a single point across time, so the geography is ignored, or a single time slice, so time is ignored. You mentioned viewing the data in ArcGIS - to do this as a raster I mostly cheat and extract each time slice as a numpy array, and then put them together as a multilayered TIF using GDAL.

Hope this helps!

What I do in R is use the ncdf package to read the data into R, which puts the data into a multidimensional array. Then I use the plyr package combined with basic R tools to perform any processing steps (temporal average, extract timeseries). Finally, I visualize my results using the ggplot2 package. For more information on spatial data in R, please visit the R Spatial Taskview. A particularly interesting package for satellite raster data is the raster package.

Here are a couple of tools that may interest you:

• A NetCDF analysis tool called ToolsUI (FYI, this is a Java Webstart link)

• Depending on your data you may wish to consider the IDV