Title: “Visualizing Zarr with zarr-layer”
Speaker: Shane Loeffler
When: Wednesday, March 11, 2026 at 4 PM US Eastern (2026-03-11T20:00:00Z)
Where: Launch Meeting - Zoom
Abstract:
At CarbonPlan, we’ve long used our @carbonplan/maps library to visualize Zarr data in the browser. But as datasets grew in resolution, the constraints of this approach became clear: data had to be reprojected and rechunked into tile-aligned mercator pyramids, requiring duplicate storage, expensive preprocessing, and distortions from resampling. We built zarr-layer to loosen these constraints.
zarr-layer is a TypeScript library that renders Zarr as a native Custom Layer in Maplibre/Mapbox maps. Instead of requiring tile-aligned chunks, zarr-layer selects intersecting chunks at the current resolution, fetches and decodes them, and reprojects on the GPU. It leverages multiscales, when available, for fast overview support, and supports a wide variety of stores, including Icechunk.
We hope this tooling will lower the barriers to adding Zarr datasets to mapping applications.
Agenda:
- ~15 minutes – Showcase presentation
- 10-30 minutes – Discussion
- 15-30 minutes – Community check-in