OPeNDAP in the Cloud: Metadata Driving Performant, Interoperable, and Sustainable Geospatial Workflows

Earth science data is growing rapidly, with NASA’s archives projected to exceed 400 petabytes, much of it stored in the cloud—even though many datasets were never designed for cloud-native access. Instead of rewriting massive files into new formats, OPeNDAP uses DMR++, a sidecar metadata file that maps a dataset’s internal structure and enables efficient server-side subsetting, web streaming without full downloads, and cloud-native virtualization through tools like VirtualiZarr and Kerchunk.