A Hierarchical Tensor-Based Approach to Compressing, Updating and Querying Geospatial Data

With the rapid development of data observation and model simulation in geoscience, spatial-temporal data have become increasingly multidimensional, massive and are consistently being updated. As a result, the integrated maintenance of these data is becoming a challenge. This paper presents a blocked hierarchical tensor representation within the split-and-merge paradigm for the compressed storage, continuously updating and data querying of multidimensional geospatial field data. The original multidimensional geospatial field data are split into small blocks according to their spatial-temporal references. These blocks are represented and compressed hierarchically, and then combined into a single hierarchical tree as the representation of original data. With a buffered binary tree data structure and corresponding optimized operation algorithms, the original multidimensional geospatial field data can be continuously compressed, appended, and queried. Data from the 20th Century Reanalysis Monthly Mean Composites are used to evaluate the performance of this approach. Compared to traditional methods, the new approach is shown to retain the quality of the original data with much lower storage costs and faster computational performance. The result suggests that the blocked hierarchical tensor representation provides an effective structure for integrated storage, presentation and computation of multidimensional geospatial field data.