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The main reason to use geoserver as middle ware to create webservices from netCDF's is the ability to style data and to enable the time variable so that the data in a netCDF can be animated in a web interface. Geoserver can not handle netCDF files out of the box. You need to install an extension for geoserver. These extensions can be found at the website of boundlessgeo (bear in mind that the extensions depend on the version of geoserver that is used).
The netCDF plugin documentation has some notes on supported netCDF's. It is quite clear that only netCDF's are supported with the following dimensions:
- lon
- lat
- (time)
- (z)
where dimensions between () are optional. The variables should have at leas dimension lat, lon. If time and z are dimensions, the order is time, z, lat, lon.
The number of variables can vary from 1 to many as long as the dimensions are kept the same. This has implications in a lot of cases, especially where coordinates are not in lat lon (WGS84) but in projections systems.
The picture below is a working example with time enable animation for several variables. 