Like many types of scientific data, results from simulations of volcanic ash diffusion are of a clustered sparse matrix in the netCDF format. Since these data sets are large in size, they generate high storage and transmission costs. In this paper, we suggest a new method that reduces the size of the data of volcanic ash diffusion simulations by converting the multi-dimensional index to a single dimension and keeping only the starting point and length of the consecutive zeros. This method presents performance that is almost as good as that of ZIP format compression, but does not destroy the netCDF structure. The suggested method is expected to allow for storage space to be efficiently used by reducing both the data size and the network transmission time.