This article misses one of the coolest things about the Zarr format - that it's flexible enough that it's also becoming widely used in climate science.
In particular the Pangeo project (https://pangeo.io/architecture.html) uses large Zarr stores as a performant format in the cloud which we can analyse in parallel at scale using distributed computing frameworks like dask.
I use the Zarr format (for climate science data rather than microscope data), and I think this is just poor wording in the article. In the Zarr specification the metadata is stored separately from the actual chunks of compressed array data. So the metadata applies at the array level, not the pixel level.
> Wait - are there optical microscopes that can create 3D images?
I think so - they do it by scanning lots of images at different focal lengths to create a 3D section (I think?). There are whole projects just for visualizing the multi-TeraByte 3D image files produced - Napari is an open-source image viewer which opens OME-Zarr data.
In particular the Pangeo project (https://pangeo.io/architecture.html) uses large Zarr stores as a performant format in the cloud which we can analyse in parallel at scale using distributed computing frameworks like dask.
More and more climate science data is being made publicly available as Zarr in the cloud, often through open data partnerships with cloud providers (e.g. on AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/decrease-geospatia...) ERA-5 on GCP(https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/public-datasets/era5)).
I personally think that the more that common tooling can be shared between scientific disciplines the better.