Welcome to xarray-leaflet’s documentation!¶
xarray-leaflet is an xarray extension for tiled map plotting. In the world of web mapping, tiles are chunks of the image you see on your screen, usually of 256x256 pixels. They are requested by e.g. Leaflet when they are visible in your map view. This allows to handle only parts of the map, which could be otherwise huge in its totality. It also allows to e.g. reveal more details as you zoom in.
Chunks also sound familiar to xarray users, because xarray can make use of Dask and Zarr under the hood to handle parts of data that wouldn’t fit in memory otherwise. The idea with xarray-leaflet is to generate tiles using xarray as they are requested by Leaflet when the user interacts with the map, either by dragging it or by zooming. xarray can process only the chunks that are needed to render each tile, do some aggregation operation on them (e.g. coarsen), or whatever transformation you want to extract data that is relevant to the current map view.