Earth Compress is a three-year, £7 million project funded by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), led by the National Oceanography Centre and Asterisk Labs. It develops and operationalises highly performant compression algorithms that massively reduce the size and cost of increasingly large environmental datasets.

The problem

Environmental datasets are growing to petabyte scale, and the cost of hosting, transferring and analysing them has become a bottleneck for high-impact research. When storing and moving the data is expensive, fewer people can work with it — and the science slows down.

Our approach

We work closely with data producers like ECMWF and EUMETSAT, alongside the wider Earth observation and environmental communities, to build an open-source toolbox that democratises data access — letting anyone run global-scale experiments and analysis on petabytes of data.

To hear more about the project, read ARIA’s announcement.