With R, this is just proving to myself that I can write all the local-path references.
Ran on 128 cores on HPC it did about 3200 of these files (it's still going, there are 8000+ days since 2002 July 01. Virtualizing netcdf is insanely efficient, but the details of how to auth those remote links still beyond me (which is what I'm working towards understanding). The scratch path below on my lustre storage would be replace by the base url and its child date structure:
https://archive.podaac.earthdata.nasa.gov/podaac-ops-cumulus-protected/MUR-JPL-L4-GLOB-v4.1
They look like this here without the shard structure.