At NSF Unidata, we have been supporting and developing netCDF standards and packages since the original release of netCDF in 1990. We strongly believe in the usefulness of netCDF Common Data Model for Earth Systems Science data, and for other types of data! NetCDF files can be used efficiently in machine learning modeling applications and can be used as a virtual Zarr datasets.
NSF Unidata has been urged by our community to investigate options to allow netCDF to work more easily with modern cloud-based infrastructure. Based on the strong interest and rapid adoption of Zarr by the community, the netCDF team decided to begin working with the Zarr community to ensure that these two widely used data storage mechanisms can interoperate if necessary.
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