Skip to content

deck.gl-raster

GPU-accelerated raster visualization for deck.gl, with backends for both Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) and Zarr. Maintained by Development Seed under the MIT license. Supersedes numeric-data-layer.

At a glance

  • Repo — developmentseed/deck.gl-raster
  • Shape — Library, monorepo packages under the @developmentseed namespace. End users rely on @developmentseed/deck.gl-zarr as the high-level entry point.
  • Map host — deck.gl (typically with MapLibre GL, Mapbox GL, or Google Maps as the basemap)
  • Render API — WebGL2 via luma.gl shader modules
  • Zarr versions — v3 (in the current @developmentseed/deck.gl-zarr package)
  • Conventions — GeoZarr (spatial, multiscales, proj)

What it does

deck.gl-raster provides a generic raster pipeline that is independent of the tile source. The same RasterTileLayer and RasterLayer render either COG tiles (via @developmentseed/cogeotiff) or Zarr chunks (via @developmentseed/deck.gl-zarr), because the architecture defines a common TilesetDescriptor interface that both backends satisfy. The result is that a project standardizing on deck.gl can mix Zarr and COG layers in the same scene without bringing in a second rendering stack.

How it renders

The pipeline is composed from luma.gl shader modules. A user constructs a render pipeline as a list, for example renderPipeline: [LinearRescale, Colormap, FilterNoDataVal], and the framework wires uniforms and texture bindings on the GPU. Built-in modules cover linear rescaling to [0, 1], colormap LUT sampling against a 256-entry RGBA texture, nodata masking, and band compositing of up to four input bands with per-band UV transforms. Users can write custom fragment shaders to express arbitrary band math; the published examples include NDVI from NIR and Red textures and an AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings mosaic.

Reprojection from the source CRS to Web Mercator is performed on the GPU using an adaptive triangle mesh. This keeps non-Mercator data renderable inside an otherwise Mercator deck.gl scene.

Zarr handling

Zarr support is split across two new packages. @developmentseed/geozarr parses the GeoZarr conventions, including multiscales, axis order, and CRS, and produces a TilesetDescriptor. @developmentseed/deck.gl-zarr wraps that descriptor in a ZarrLayer that delegates to the generic RasterTileLayer. Non-spatial dimensions are addressed via an explicit selection: Record<string, SliceInput> map keyed by dimension name, so time, band, depth, and similar axes are first-class.

Reads use zarrita. Zarr v2, OME-NGFF, and CF conventions are listed as future work.

Where it fits

Choose deck.gl-raster when the wider scene is already deck.gl, when you want a single rendering stack across COG and Zarr, or when you need GeoZarr metadata handling out of the box. The cost is the deck.gl dependency and the assumption of a tile-pyramid view of the data; it is not currently aimed at in-browser volumetric exploration of a Zarr cube, though the generic architecture does not preclude adding it.