NetCDF Standards

Status of standards body endorsements of netCDF and related conventions

The netCDF format has been endorsed by several standards bodies:

On 2009-02-05, the NASA Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Standards Process Group officially endorsed the document ESDS-RFC-011, NetCDF Classic and 64-bit Offset File Formats, as an appropriate standard for NASA Earth Science data.
On 2010-03-12, the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Data Management and Communications (DMAC) Subsystem endorsed netCDF with Climate and Forecast (CF) conventions as a preferred data format.
On 2010-09-27, the Steering Committee of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) officially endorsed netCDF as a "Common Encoding Standard (CES)".
On 2010-10-18, the ESDS-RFC-021 Technical Working Group issued a final report concluding that the NASA ESDS Standards Process Group should recommend ESDS-RFC-021, CF Metadata Conventions, for endorsement as a NASA Recommended Standard.
On 2011-04-19, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) approved the OGC Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Core Encoding Standard, and NetCDF Binary Encoding Extension Standard - netCDF Classic and 64-bit Offset Format as official OGC standards. These standards are available for free download at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/netcdf.
On 2011-11-03, the ESDS-RFC-022 Technical Working Group issued a final report recommending ESDS-RFC-022, NetCDF-4/HDF-5 File Format, for endorsement as a NASA Recommended Standard.