NASA is now funding an NCO project to improve NCO by supporting netCDF-4 group hierarchies and applicabilty to HDF-EOS data. Many new recent improvements have resulted.

• security/integrity checks with optional MD5 hashes of data for each variable
• multi-record multi-variable netCDF3 (MM3) speedup on large file block systems (10-50x), using record-at-a-time instead of variable-at-a-time processing
• improved support for "bounds" and "coordinates" attributes (often used in the CMIP5 archive)
• native support for Windows
• elimination of need for intermediate files in hyperslabbing operators
• support for "diskless" feature of netCDF 4.2.1
• earlier additions include support for netCDF-4 primitive types, and DAP support for all operators

2012 Unidata NetCDF Workshop > Third-party netCDF packages: NCO, NCL, CDO