Articles | Volume 10, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-413-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-413-2017
Development and technical paper
 | 
27 Jan 2017
Development and technical paper |  | 27 Jan 2017

The compression–error trade-off for large gridded data sets

Jeremy D. Silver and Charles S. Zender

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Interactive discussion

Status: closed
Status: closed
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
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Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision
AR by Jeremy David Silver on behalf of the Authors (28 Oct 2016)  Author's response    Manuscript
ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (09 Nov 2016) by Paul Ullrich
RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (17 Nov 2016)
RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (18 Nov 2016)
ED: Publish as is (19 Nov 2016) by Paul Ullrich
AR by Jeremy David Silver on behalf of the Authors (06 Dec 2016)  Author's response    Manuscript
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Short summary
Many modern scientific research projects generate large amounts of data. Storage space is valuable and may be limited; hence compression is vital. We tested different compression methods for large gridded data sets, assessing the space savings and the amount of precision lost. We found a general trade-off between precision and compression, with compression well-predicted by the entropy of the data set. A method introduced here proved to be a competitive archive format for gridded numerical data.