An experimental format that can be streamed to S3 (and read from s3 efficiently). It only supports a subset of GDAL features. It is envisaged this will only be of use to people using AWS Batch who are sick of having to expand the local storage using a LaunchTemplate to accomodate other formats that must be written locally before copying to S3. Files in EMU format can be written directly to S3 using the /vsis3 GDAL virtual filesystem.

It is likely too, that EMU will be used as an intermediate formate before being translated into GeoTiff or KEA for distribution.

It will support overviews (calculated as it goes) and does support the calculation of stats as it goes. It will soon support histograms and basic Raster Attribute Tables.

It is designed to be written only by RIOS. Other methods may result in errors or corruption of data.

Furthermore with RIOS, the blocksize must be set to 512x512 and the calculation of stats/pyramid layers must be disabled. See the file copyfile.py for more information.

It doesn't (and will not) support update of files in place.

A general format for imagery. See the KEA format for a better alternative.

• Histograms
• RAT
• Calculation of pyramid layers on writing.

Q. Should I use this operationally? A. Absolutely not

Q. Does it work under Windows? A. Dunno

Q. Are you going to add support for other features not already covered above? A. No