Xarray-TensorStore is a small library that allows opening Zarr arrays into Xarray via TensorStore, instead of the standard Zarr-Python library. In some cases, we've found it to be considerably faster.

Warning: Xarray-TensorStore relies upon internal Xarray APIs that will likely change in future versions of Xarray, precisely to accommodate these sorts of use-cases. Expect that the current version of Xarray-TensorStore will break at some point in the future and require updates for a new Xarray release.

Xarray-TensorStore is available on pypi:

pip install xarray-tensorstore

Open your Zarr files into an xarray.Dataset using open_zarr(), and then use read() to start reading data in the background:

import xarray_tensorstore
ds = xarray_tensorstore.open_zarr(path)
# As with xarray.open_zarr(), indexing & transposing is lazy
example = ds.sel(time='2020-01-01').transpose('longitude', 'latitude', ...)
# Optional: start reading data in all arrays asynchronously
read_example = xarray_tensorstore.read(example)
# Blocking conversion of the data into NumPy arrays. This happens sequentially,
# one array at a time, unless you call read() first.
numpy_example = read_example.compute()

• Xarray-TensorStore still uses Zarr-Python under the covers to open Zarr groups and read coordinate data (TensorStore does not yet support Zarr groups).
• Unlike xarray.open_zarr, decoding of data arrays according to CF Conventions (e.g., scale and add_offset attributes) is not supported.