an interface for array-oriented data access and a library that provides an implementation of the interface. The netCDF library also defines a machine-independent format for representing scientific data.
a general purpose library and file format for storing scientific data. It arranges data into datasets (multidimensional arrays) and groups (a structure for organizing objects). With extra software support like a viewer, etc...
K. Kennedy, C. Koelbel, and H. Zima. Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages, page 7-1--7-22. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)