Comment by geokon
18 hours ago
I'm not super knowledgeable about this stuff.. but out of curiosity, what advantage does it have over NetCDF?
I wrote a program processing GeoTIFF data. When I had started this project I chose GeoTIFF mostly b/c i wanted something simple. And I could load them in to Java's BufferImage class and manipulate them that way. But it seems all the pros exclusively use NetCDF and GeoTiffs are for noobs (working with atmospheric science data here)
GeoTIFF does extend "images" to cover more usecases, but a lot of stuff doesn't fit (like say a wind vector) and then you need some other container or metadata b/c you generally have many images. So I get the sense the complexity just ends up being moved elsewhere.
Generally speaking I would classify TIFF and its variants as imaging formats (or for very simple numerical datasets), and NetCDF as more suited for raw data, in particular multi-dimensional data with time series, etc.
For forecast and climatological data I find NetCDF is vastly superior, but also much more complicated to work with due to the capabilities and how open the format is. Just have a look at the complexity of the CF Conventions to see what I mean: https://cfconventions.org/cf-conventions/release/v1.12.0/cf-...
For visualizing orthophotos and the like, I would choose GeoTIFF any day of the week, as they're easy to visualize across platforms using existing libraries. Using COGs you also get the functionality of a spatial index within each GeoTIFF file, meaning that you can stream subsets of GeoTIFF files without having to scan through the entire file for each request.