[tomnicholas1]

> Why is weather data stored in netcdf instead of tensors or sparse tensors?

NetCDF is a "tensor", at least in the sense of being a self-describing multi-dimensional array format. The bigger problem is that it's not a Cloud-Optimized format, which is why Zarr has become popular.

> Also, SQLite supports virtual tables that can be backed by Content Range requests

The multi-dimensional equivalent of this is "virtual Zarr". I made this library to create virtual Zarr stores pointing at archival data (e.g. netCDF and GRIB)

https://github.com/zarr-developers/VirtualiZarr

> xarray and thus NetCDF-style multidimensional arrays in WASM in the browser with HTTP Content Range requests to fetch and cache just the data requested

Pretty sure you can do this today already using Xarray and fsspec.