You are trying to read 2928 * 277 * 349 = 283 million elements at once. When you switched to NetcdfDataset, these are being promoted to floats, so 4 bytes per element. Better is to loop over the outer dimension if possible and process the dataset in pieces. See "Reading data from a Variable" from the tutorial: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/tutorial/NetcdfFile.html Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: GGI-373709 Department: Support netCDF Java Priority: Urgent Status: Closed