I just had the same issue and thought I should post my solution, just in case anyone else encounters the same problem. I was using ArcGIS 10.2.2, and every time I tried to convert a raster file to NetCDF, it resulted in a 4kb NetCDF file that didn't come with any parameters and couldn't be plotted. Thankfully, I thought of trying the same tool at a colleagues computer that had ArcGIS 10.3 installed. And voila, it worked. So just in case you also have this problem, try to make a raster NetSDF using ArcGIS 10.3 instead.
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