Meet the Earthmover Team at the Cloud Native Geospatial Conference 2025!
The Earthmover team is heading to Snowbird, Utah for the Cloud Native Geospatial (CNG) Conference 2025 this week. For our part, we’ll be there to talk about our recent open-source work on Xarray, Zarr, and Icechunk – including leading a 3-hour workshop – and to spread the word about the Earthmover Platform, our fully managed cloud data platform for multidimensional data.
The CNG conference is a great opportunity to learn how experts across industry, government, and academia are leveraging geospatial data to tackle significant global challenges. We’re excited to contribute our perspective, particularly around scalable, cloud-native data analysis using tools like Zarr, Xarray and Icechunk.
Where You’ll Find Us
We’re involved in several sessions throughout the conference, focusing on practical applications and the future of geospatial data handling in the cloud. We will also have a booth at the conference so swing by and say hello and see a demo of the Earthmover Platform!
Workshop: Zarr, Icechunk, & Xarray for Cloud-native Geospatial Data-cube Analysis
Join our team for an in-depth, 3-hour workshop designed to get you started with Zarr for cloud-native datacube analysis.
Learning Goals:
- Understand the Zarr chunked n-dimensional array format and how it complements the Raster/GDAL model.
- Build cloud-native datacubes from GeoTIFF inputs.
- Experiment with Icechunk’s version control.
- Explore geospatial analytics using Xarray, including raster-vector joins and zonal statistics.
Structure: Each hour includes instruction, hands-on coding with instructor support, and breaks. We’ll start with the basics of Xarray and Zarr, then progress to help you build your own datacubes, and perform advanced analytics, culminating in demos of production pipelines.
Talk: Zarr for Cloud-native Geospatial. When and Why?
Presented by Lindsey Nield and Deepak Cherian, this talk addresses a key question in the community: when should you choose Zarr over the established COG/STAC architecture? We’ll delve into why teams are increasingly adopting Zarr for building large-scale earth-observation data cubes, highlighting its advantages for harmonized spatiotemporal grids (level-3 data).
Talk: Cloud-native geospatial datacube workflows with Xarray and Zarr
Emma Marshall (University of Utah), who is also co-leading our workshop, will present on the transformative potential of cloud-based compute, storage, and optimized data formats for scientific discovery. This talk explores practical workflows using Xarray and Zarr, while also addressing the challenges users face when adopting these powerful new tools and skills.
Dealing with massive collections of individual, often archived, data files? Tom Nicholas will introduce VirtualiZarr and Icechunk, demonstrating how these tools can efficiently create coherent, cloud-optimised datacubes from pre-cloud archival formats, simplifying access and analysis directly from object storage.
Moving from Science to Product: Making Cloud-Native Geospatial Work for Us
Naomi Provost of CTrees will highlight how cloud-native workflows built on the Earthmover Platform drastically accelerated their transition from research output to polished product.
Beyond our team, here are a few presentations that touch on Xarray, Zarr, or Icechunk. We’re excited to check these out:
- Sentinel’s EOPF Toolkit: Driving Community Adoption of the Zarr data format for Copernicus Sentinel Data by Julia Wagemann
- STAC <> Zarr by Julia Signell
- Zarr: Landsat Trade Study at Scale by Zachariah Dicus
- Super-fast cloud storage operations with Obstore by Kyle Barron
- Why machine learning people should think about databases: lessons from AI weather models by Alexander Merose
- GPU-accelerated Cloud-Native Geospatial by Tom Augspurger
- Efficient Weather Radar Data Management in Practice: FAIR Principles and Cloud-Native Solutions by Alfonso Ladino
Come Say Hello!
Beyond these sessions, you’ll find the Earthmover team participating throughout the conference. Look for Joe, Deepak, Lindsey, Tom, and other members of our crew in the hallway track, attending talks, and joining discussions.
We’re always ready to chat about Zarr, Xarray, Icechunk, building scalable data pipelines, the future of geospatial analysis, or anything else cloud-native. Don’t hesitate to introduce yourself – we’d love to connect!
See you in Snowbird!