From Chris, via email, 10 June 2019:
OK, that provides a good diagnostic of what’s going on. But does that mean that it is impossible to build a gdal that works with both local netCDF files and remote OPeNDAP in S3?
I built GDAL that uses DODS and also uses local NetCDF (and HDF5) support. It works as you’d expect with the odd caveat that if a dataset URL ends in .nc and the underlying variables are > 2d, the gdal 3.x code will use HTTP to copy the file and then open the local copy using the netCDF driver (which may work). This is probably not what we want. So, we should probably update the dods driver to work with >2 dimensions.