Is there interest in having a Julian API for the NCDC's Climate Data Online (CDO)

which would probably lead to a single package for I/O and another one for analysis

This would make sense imo.

If you have ideas about how it could be more generic, I’d be interested to hear them!

When I make myself more familiar with julia, and decide that it is worth to use it, I might contribute. I was thinking about a generic data set reader which a user could easily overload, like

function open_NOAA_data(path)
ds=open_generic_dataset(path)
apply_landsea_mask(ds)
flip_north_south(ds)
shiftgrid(ds)
....
return ds

Then a user would do:

ds=open_NOAA_data(path)
list_variables(ds)
print_attributes(ds)
SST=read_data(ds,"SST",slice)

Not sure if this makes sense though.