Early releases of the software have seen very wide adoption within the international environmental data community, forming a key component of systems for data visualization and access, and this paper describes the first full official version (1.0), released in December 2012. We describe how ncWMS interprets and extends the WMS specification to accommodate gridded environmental data (Section 2), we give some key features of the implementation (Section 3), we provide some examples of user adoption (Section 4) and finally we draw conclusions and outline future directions of work (Section 5).