Zarr and GeoZarr

I work in the same group as the folk producing the Tessera foundation model. Whilst the foundation model itself is exciting, one of the things I've been trying to get my head around is how they're using the Zarr data format for the underlying storage, rather than the more common GeoTIFF format. I find GeoTIFF frustrating to use for a number of reasons, and so was curious to learn more about the benefits of Zarr over the more established format. Zarr Zarr itself isn't anything to do with geospatial, it is rather a container format for storing a set of multi-dimensional arrays, optionally with some hierarchy to help give some structure to the collection. Multi-dimensional arrays Given people are familiar with raster/bitmap images as a way of storing data, let's start from there. In terms of image data we typically have a single two dimensional array. In TIFF you can actually store multiple "bands", which is to say multiple images of the same width and height. This is actually how true…