A standard WMS enumerates a finite number of Styles in which images can be generated from Layers.
These cannot be configured by the end user.
Scientific users usually require more flexibility, for example to control how data values map to the palette colours.
In ncWMS, each Style corresponds with a colour palette, which is identified through an opaque identifier such as “greyscale”, “redblue” and “rainbow”.
Vector layers (such as velocity fields) have a further set of Styles for representing vectors as arrows, overlain on top of the magnitude field (see Fig. 1).