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The .dods extension is how the server knows you want the data rather than just the metadata (the DDS). The critical point is that the server you are accessing is requiring a constraint expression (e.g. ?time). This is probably the source of the problem you are seeing. if you do simple ncdump of the url, there is no constraint attached so the server gives back that error message. As you say, this is to prevent someone from trying to download the whole dataset. The simplest work around is to always ask for a specific variable to ncdump using the -v flag. =Dennis Heimbigner Unidata Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: TMR-458993 Department: Support netCDF Priority: Urgent Status: Closed