I have noticed that when downloading CAMS products, they are provided as ZIP files. I understand that this format offers advantages, especially when a user queries multiple NetCDF files simultaneously. However, it seems that no compression is enabled: for a single file, the size of the ZIP file is identical to that of the extracted NetCDF file.
This raises two questions:
-
Why is compression not enabled for the ZIP files?
-
Why isn’t internal zlib compression used within the NetCDF files themselves?
I suspect the answer might be related to the computational load on the servers, but it seems unfortunate that such large, uncompressed files are being queried.