2010 Unidata NetCDF Workshop > Introduction to NetCDF-4
13.11 Compression
Per-variable compression means variables may be compressed independently.
- Readers access compressed variables transparently, without
knowing they are compressed.
- Compressed variables must be stored with chunked storage.
- Each chunk is compressed or uncompressed independently.
- Permits efficient access to small subsets of a large compressed variable
without uncompressing entire variable
- Better compression can be achieved with chunking parameters. For
example, horizontal layers of the atmosphere might
be good chunks for a variable that is fairly uniform within a layer,
such as temperature.
2010 Unidata NetCDF Workshop > Introduction to NetCDF-4