We present a progressive compression technique for volumetric subdivision meshes based on the slow growing refinement algorithm. The system is comprised of a wavelet transform followed by a progressive encoding of the resulting wavelet coefficients.We compare the efficiency of two wavelet transforms. The first transform is based on the smoothing rules used in the slow growing subdivision technique. The second transform is a generalization of lifted linear B-spline wavelets to the same multi-tier refinement structure. Direct coupling with a hierarchical coder produces progressive bit streams. Rate distortion metrics are evaluated for both wavelet transforms.We tested the practical performance of the scheme on synthetic data as well as data from laser indirect-drive fusion simulations with multiple fields per vertex. Both wavelet transforms result in high quality trade off curves and produce qualitatively good coarse representations.