The xarray library handles arbitrary-dimensional netCDF data, and retains metadata. Xarray provides a simple method of opening netCDF files, and converting them to pandas dataframes:
import xarray as xr
ds = xr.open_dataset('/path/to/netcdf')
df = ds.to_dataframe()
This will create a dataframe with a multi-index with all of the dimensions in it. Unfortunately, Pandas doesn’t support arbitrary metadata, so that will be lost in the conversion, but you can keep the ds around, and use the metadata from that.