In this video, I talk a bit about why oceanographers (and many other scientists) use NetCDF file. Then I show how to use an app from the nctools system,' to get an overview of such files. And, finally, I show how to get an overview using an R script I wrote (available at the gist quoted below). The advantage of this script is that you won't need to download the 'nctools' package.
https://gist.github.com/dankelley/0ad...