Error bounded compression for weather and climate applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Langwen, Fusco, Luigi, Scheidl, Florian, Zibell, Jan, Sprenger, Michael Armand, Schemm, Sebastian, Hoefler, Torsten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huang, Langwen
Fusco, Luigi
Scheidl, Florian
Zibell, Jan
Sprenger, Michael Armand
Schemm, Sebastian
Hoefler, Torsten
author_facet Huang, Langwen
Fusco, Luigi
Scheidl, Florian
Zibell, Jan
Sprenger, Michael Armand
Schemm, Sebastian
Hoefler, Torsten
contents As the resolution of weather and climate simulations increases, the amount of data produced is growing rapidly from hundreds of terabytes to tens of petabytes. The huge size becomes a limiting factor for broader adoption, and its fast growth rate will soon exhaust all the available storage devices. To address these issues, we present EBCC (Error Bounded Climate-data Compressor). It follows a two-layer approach: a base compression layer using JPEG2000 to capture the bulk of the data with a high compression ratio, and a residual compression layer using wavelet transform and SPIHT encoding to efficiently eliminate long-tail extreme errors introduced by the base compression layer. It incorporates a feedback rate-control mechanism for both layers that adjusts compression ratios to achieve the specified maximum error target. We evaluate EBCC alongside other established compression methods on benchmarks related to weather and climate science including error statistics, a case study on primitive and derived variables near a hurricane, evaluation of the closure of the global energy budget, and a Lagrangian air parcel trajectory simulation. This is the first time that trajectory simulation is used to benchmark compression methods. Our method concentrates most errors near zero, while others tend to distribute errors uniformly within the error bound. EBCC outperforms other methods in the benchmarks at relative error targets ranging from 0.1% to 10% and achieves compression ratios from 15x to more than 300x. In the energy budget closure and Lagrangian trajectory benchmarks, it can achieve more than 100x compression while keeping errors within natural variability derived from ERA5 uncertainty members. This verifies the effectiveness of EBCC in creating heavily compressed weather and climate datasets suitable for downstream applications. The source code of EBCC is available in github.com/spcl/EBCC.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22265
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Error bounded compression for weather and climate applications
Huang, Langwen
Fusco, Luigi
Scheidl, Florian
Zibell, Jan
Sprenger, Michael Armand
Schemm, Sebastian
Hoefler, Torsten
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
As the resolution of weather and climate simulations increases, the amount of data produced is growing rapidly from hundreds of terabytes to tens of petabytes. The huge size becomes a limiting factor for broader adoption, and its fast growth rate will soon exhaust all the available storage devices. To address these issues, we present EBCC (Error Bounded Climate-data Compressor). It follows a two-layer approach: a base compression layer using JPEG2000 to capture the bulk of the data with a high compression ratio, and a residual compression layer using wavelet transform and SPIHT encoding to efficiently eliminate long-tail extreme errors introduced by the base compression layer. It incorporates a feedback rate-control mechanism for both layers that adjusts compression ratios to achieve the specified maximum error target. We evaluate EBCC alongside other established compression methods on benchmarks related to weather and climate science including error statistics, a case study on primitive and derived variables near a hurricane, evaluation of the closure of the global energy budget, and a Lagrangian air parcel trajectory simulation. This is the first time that trajectory simulation is used to benchmark compression methods. Our method concentrates most errors near zero, while others tend to distribute errors uniformly within the error bound. EBCC outperforms other methods in the benchmarks at relative error targets ranging from 0.1% to 10% and achieves compression ratios from 15x to more than 300x. In the energy budget closure and Lagrangian trajectory benchmarks, it can achieve more than 100x compression while keeping errors within natural variability derived from ERA5 uncertainty members. This verifies the effectiveness of EBCC in creating heavily compressed weather and climate datasets suitable for downstream applications. The source code of EBCC is available in github.com/spcl/EBCC.
title Error bounded compression for weather and climate applications
topic Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22265