Output format

File format

Higher level images are generated with signed 16bit datatype in one of the following preconfigured formats:

DRIVER = GTiff
EXTENSION = tif
COMPRESS = ZSTD
PREDICTOR = 2
INTERLEAVE = BAND
BIGTIFF = YES
TILED = YES
BLOCKXSIZE = 256
BLOCKYSIZE = 256

DRIVER = COG
EXTENSION = tif
COMPRESS = ZSTD
PREDICTOR = YES
INTERLEAVE = TILE
TILED = YES
BLOCKSIZE = 256
BIGTIFF = YES
OVERVIEW_RESAMPLING = AVERAGE

DRIVER = ENVI
EXTENSION = dat

GTiff is the default and recommended format.

Note that due to GDAL constraints, it is not possible to use COGs with sub-tile processing chunks (i.e. CHUNK_SIZE smaller than TILE_SIZE). So, just don’t do that. If you want to use COGs, set the chunk size to the tile size! You need enough memory to process a full tile at once, though. Alternatively, use GTiff as output format, which works with sub-tile chunks, and the new configuration is actually pretty comparable to COGs.

Users may also use a custom format by providing GDAL configuration options in the same format as shown above.

FORCE versions older than 3.8.01-dev:::2025-09-17_14:04:58 used a different GeoTiff configuration. If you want to create GeoTiff files with the old configuration, you may use following settings in a custom format. Note that you need to adapt the block sizes to your tile size, such that you have BLOCKXSIZE being the tile size in x direction and BLOCKYSIZE being a divisor of the tile size in y direction, usually 10 blocks.

DRIVER = GTiff
EXTENSION = tif
COMPRESS = LZW
PREDICTOR = 2
INTERLEAVE = BAND
BIGTIFF = YES
BLOCKXSIZE = 30000
BLOCKYSIZE = 3000

Metadata

Metadata are written to all output products. For GeoTiff format, the metadata are written into the GeoTiff file. If the metadata is larger than allowed by the GeoTiff driver, the excess metadata will be written to an “auxiliary metadata” file with .aux.xml extension. FORCE-specific metadata will be written to the FORCE domain, and thus are probably not visible unless the FORCE domain (or all domains) are specifically printed:

gdalinfo -mdd all some-higher-level-product.tif