# Video Compression for Spatiotemporal Earth System Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19656 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19656/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [WeatherBench 2: A benchmark for the next generation of data-driven global weather models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15560/) (2023)
- [DynamicEarthNet: Daily Multi-Spectral Satellite Dataset for Semantic Change Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12560/) (2022)
- [reBEN: Refined BigEarthNet Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03653/) (2024)
- [EarthNet2021: A large-scale dataset and challenge for Earth surface forecasting as a guided video prediction task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10066/) (2021)
- [Major TOM: Expandable Datasets for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12095/) (2024)
- [CRA5: Extreme Compression of ERA5 for Portable Global Climate and Weather Research via an Efficient Variational Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03376/) (2024)
- [DeepExtremeCubes: Integrating Earth system spatio-temporal data for impact assessment of climate extremes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18179/) (2024)
- [Explainable Earth Surface Forecasting under Extreme Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01770/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Implicit Neural Representation for Hyperspectral Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31435/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale Earth system datasets, from high-resolution remote sensing imagery to spatiotemporal climate model outputs, exhibit characteristics analogous to those of standard videos. Their inherent spatial, temporal, and spectral redundancies can thus be readily exploited by established video compression techniques. Here, we present xarrayvideo, a Python library for compressing multichannel spatiotemporal datasets by encoding them as videos. Our approach achieves compression ratios of up to 250x while maintaining high fidelity by leveraging standard, well-optimized video codecs through ffmpeg. We demonstrate the library's effectiveness on four real-world multichannel spatiotemporal datasets: DynamicEarthNet (very high resolution Planet images), DeepExtremeCubes (high resolution Sentinel-2 images), ERA5 (weather reanalysis data), and the SimpleS2 dataset (high resolution multichannel Sentinel-2 images), achieving Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNRs) of 55.86, 40.60, 46.58, and 43.23 dB at 0.1 bits per pixel per band (bpppb) and 65.91, 54.28, 62.90, and 55.04 dB at 1 bpppb. We are redistributing two of these datasets, DeepExtremeCubes (2.3 Tb) and DynamicEarthNet (525 Gb), in the machine-learning-ready and cloud-ready TACO format through HuggingFace at significantly reduced sizes (270 Gb and 8.5 Gb, respectively) without compromising quality (PSNR 55.77-56.65 and 60.15). No performance loss is observed when the compressed versions of these datasets are used in their respective deep learning-based downstream tasks (next step reflectance prediction and landcover segmentation). In conclusion, xarrayvideo presents an efficient solution for handling the rapidly growing size of Earth observation datasets, making advanced compression techniques accessible and practical to the Earth science community. The library is available for use at https://github.com/IPL-UV/xarrayvideo