Fieldset.from_zarr?

[selipot]

I am raising a conversation (see link below) to the status of an issue as a way to request a new feature/enhancement to parcels.

Could we have Fieldset.from_zarr like we have Fieldset.from_netcdf in a way such that large data input are possible? In my case, the solution of opening my zarr store with xarray and then using Fieldset.from_xarray_dataset does not work because my zarr store is about 680GB and I get a memory error (parcels version 2.4.1.dev9). I can lazily open the zarr store with xarray but it does not seem to be passed on to parcels. Open to suggestions with the existing code!

https://github.com/OceanParcels/parcels/discussions/1522#discussion-6369498

[erikvansebille]

Thanks for raising this Issue, @selipot. This would indeed be a very useful addition to the code, but to be honest I don't think we'll implement it very soon; because of a lack of time and resources at the moment. It could be that I find some time over summer (August 2024) to work on this, but probably not before

Note that there is a reasonable chance that we will refactor the complete FieldSet creation code anyways in the coming year, if/when we get funded to implement unstructured-grid support (fingers crossed; we should hear soon...) If that's the case, then we'll likely implement support lazy zarr from scratch, building much more on existing (xarray?) functionality for handling fields where possible. But that would be a ~ 2 years effort, so also not implemented very soon

[VeckoTheGecko]

Closing as unplanned. This is only relevant for v3, as for v4 we're migrating to using xarray for fieldset input, so zarr will be supported.