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Surely Zarr is already a long-term storage format for multidimensional data? It can even be mapped directly to netCDF, GRIB and geoTIFF via VirtualiZarr[0].

Also if you like Iceberg and you like arrays you will really like Icechunk[1], which is Version-controlled Zarr!

[0] https://github.com/zarr-developers/VirtualiZarr

[1] https://icechunk.io/en/latest/

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I know icechunk and I’m a huge fan of earthmover. But a common binary format like parquet seems nice… with interop for e.g duckdb and geo queries, you can “just load” era5 and do something like get wind direction/speed along the following path for the last 5 years group by day etc…

If you know the exact tensor shape of your data ahead of time Zarr works well (we use it as the dataformat for our ml experiments). If you have dynamically growing data or irregular shapes zarr doesn't work as well.

Icechunk can handle growing dimensions with ACID transactions!

For irregular shapes in some cases using multiple groups + xarray.DataTree can help you, but in general yeah ragged data is hard.

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