Evaluation of lossless and lossy algorithms for the compression of scientific datasets in netCDF-4 or HDF5 files

Abstract

The increasing volume of scientific datasets requires the use of compression to reduce data storage and transmission costs, especially for the oceanographic or meteorological datasets generated by Earth observation mission ground segments. These data are mostly produced in netCDF files. Indeed, the netCDF-4/HDF5 file formats are widely used throughout the global scientific community because of the useful features they offer. HDF5 in particular offers a dynamically loaded filter plugin so that users can write compression/decompression filters, for example, and process the data before reading or writing them to disk. This study evaluates lossy and lossless compression/decompression methods through netCDF-4 and HDF5 tools on analytical and real scientific floating-point datasets. We also introduce the Digit Rounding algorithm, a new relative error-bounded data reduction method inspired by the Bit Grooming algorithm. The Digit Rounding algorithm offers a high compression ratio while keeping a given number of significant digits in the dataset. It achieves a higher compression ratio than the Bit Grooming algorithm with slightly lower compression speed.