Store virtual datasets as Kerchunk Parquet references¶

Overview¶

In this notebook we will cover how to store virtual datasets as Kerchunk Parquet references instead of Kerchunk JSON references. For large virtual datasets, using Parquet should have performance implications as the overall reference file size should be smaller and the memory overhead of combining the reference files should be lower.

This notebook builds upon the Kerchunk Basics, Multi-File Datasets with Kerchunk and the Kerchunk and Dask notebooks.

Prerequisites¶

Concepts	Importance	Notes
Basics of virtual Zarr stores	Required	Core
Multi-file virtual datasets with VirtualiZarr	Required	Core
Parallel virtual dataset creation with VirtualiZarr, Kerchunk, and Dask	Required	Core
Introduction to Xarray	Required	IO/Visualization

Time to learn: 30 minutes

Imports¶

import logging

import dask
import fsspec
import xarray as xr
from distributed import Client
from virtualizarr import open_virtual_dataset

Setting up the `Dask` Client¶

client = Client(n_workers=8, silence_logs=logging.ERROR)
client

/home/runner/micromamba/envs/kerchunk-cookbook/lib/python3.14/site-packages/distributed/node.py:195: UserWarning: Port 8787 is already in use.
Perhaps you already have a cluster running?
Hosting the HTTP server on port 35767 instead
  warnings.warn(

Create Input File List¶

Here we are using fsspec's glob functionality along with the * wildcard operator and some string slicing to grab a list of NetCDF files from a s3 fsspec filesystem.

# Initiate fsspec filesystems for reading
fs_read = fsspec.filesystem("s3", anon=True, skip_instance_cache=True)

files_paths = fs_read.glob("s3://smn-ar-wrf/DATA/WRF/DET/2022/12/31/12/*")

# Here we prepend the prefix 's3://', which points to AWS.
files_paths = sorted(["s3://" + f for f in files_paths])

Subset the Data¶

To speed up our example, lets take a subset of the year of data.

# If the subset_flag == True (default), the list of input files will
# be subset to speed up the processing
subset_flag = True
if subset_flag:
    files_paths = files_paths[0:4]

Generate Lazy References¶

Here we create a function to generate a list of Dask delayed objects.

def generate_virtual_dataset(file, storage_options):
    return open_virtual_dataset(
        file, indexes={}, reader_options={"storage_options": storage_options}
    )


storage_options = dict(anon=True, default_fill_cache=False, default_cache_type="first")
# Generate Dask Delayed objects
tasks = [
    dask.delayed(generate_virtual_dataset)(file, storage_options)
    for file in files_paths
]

Start the Dask Processing¶

To view the processing you can view it in real-time on the Dask Dashboard. ex: http://127.0.0.1:8787/status

virtual_datasets = list(dask.compute(*tasks))

2026-09-26 02:59:59,929 - distributed.worker - ERROR - Compute Failed
Key:       generate_virtual_dataset-850883a8-d0a3-4afc-b193-e90c8bc7517a
State:     executing
Task:  <Task 'generate_virtual_dataset-850883a8-d0a3-4afc-b193-e90c8bc7517a' generate_virtual_dataset(...)>
Exception: 'TypeError("open_virtual_dataset() got an unexpected keyword argument \'indexes\'")'
Traceback: '  File "/tmp/ipykernel_4548/841847916.py", line 2, in generate_virtual_dataset\n'

2026-09-26 02:59:59,933 - distributed.worker - ERROR - Compute Failed
Key:       generate_virtual_dataset-9116ee4a-79ad-4f44-9bad-643a39d2d68f
State:     executing
Task:  <Task 'generate_virtual_dataset-9116ee4a-79ad-4f44-9bad-643a39d2d68f' generate_virtual_dataset(...)>
Exception: 'TypeError("open_virtual_dataset() got an unexpected keyword argument \'indexes\'")'
Traceback: '  File "/tmp/ipykernel_4548/841847916.py", line 2, in generate_virtual_dataset\n'

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[6], line 1
----> 1 virtual_datasets = list(dask.compute(*tasks))

File ~/micromamba/envs/kerchunk-cookbook/lib/python3.14/site-packages/dask/base.py:769, in compute(traverse, optimize_graph, scheduler, get, *args, **kwargs)
    766     expr = expr.optimize()
    767     keys = list(flatten(expr.__dask_keys__()))
--> 769     results = schedule(expr, keys, **kwargs)
    771 return repack(results)

Cell In[5], line 2
----> 2     return open_virtual_dataset(
      3         file, indexes={}, reader_options={"storage_options": storage_options}
      4     )

TypeError: open_virtual_dataset() got an unexpected keyword argument 'indexes'

Combine virtual datasets using VirtualiZarr¶

combined_vds = xr.combine_nested(
    virtual_datasets, concat_dim=["time"], coords="minimal", compat="override"
)
combined_vds

Write the virtual dataset to a Kerchunk Parquet reference¶

combined_vds.virtualize.to_kerchunk("combined.parq", format="parquet")

Shutdown the Dask cluster¶

client.shutdown()

Load kerchunked dataset¶

Next we initiate a fsspec ReferenceFileSystem. We need to pass:

The name of the parquet store
The remote protocol (This is the protocol of the input file urls)
The target protocol (file since we saved our parquet store locally).

storage_options = {
    "remote_protocol": "s3",
    "skip_instance_cache": True,
    "remote_options": {"anon": True},
    "target_protocol": "file",
    "lazy": True,
}  # options passed to fsspec
open_dataset_options = {"chunks": {}}  # opens passed to xarray

ds = xr.open_dataset(
    "combined.parq",
    engine="kerchunk",
    storage_options=storage_options,
    open_dataset_options=open_dataset_options,
)
ds

Store virtual datasets as Kerchunk Parquet references