- General Notes
- Collections
- Contributions
- Updates
This README contains information on Element 84's Earth Search STAC API. Earth Search is a free-to-use SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) API containing an index of geospatial data collections available on the AWS Registry of Open Data (RODA).
This public API does not come with any guaranteed service. If you are using Earth Search in production and are interested in a private data catalog that can incorporate both public and private data sources, please reach out. Earth Search is powered by FilmDrop, a collection of open-source applications and libraries for geospatial data ingest and cataloging supported by Element 84.
To stay up to date with any new changes or datasets to the Earth Search API, please sign up for the mailing list, you can also review the mailing list archive. For a detailed writeup about the Earth Search v1 and the changes from v0, see this blog post.
All the Earth Search STAC Items make use of the following extensions:
- Grid (for most gridded datasets, except Landsat)
- Processing for indicating software libraries and versions
- Projection
- Raster
- View
Additionally, the EO extension is used for multispectral data and the SAR extension is used for SAR data.
When STAC Item assets (the data files) are in a requester pays bucket they are provided with an s3:// style URL,
since AWS credentials are needed to access. For publicly-available assets, an https:// URL is used since no
authentication is needed. The Item/Assets also indicate if it's a requester pays bucket via the
STAC storage extension
Data and metadata provided by Earth Search are processed using the Cirrus geospatial processing platform, also maintained by Element 84.
Cirrus supports an SNS Topic to which all ingested STAC Items are published. For
Earth Search, the URN for this topic is arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:608149789419:cirrus-es-prod-publish.
Messages published to this topic can be filtered based on the following attributes:
- collection (String): The STAC Collection of the STAC Item.
- datetime (String): The STAC Item
datetimevalue, a string in RFC 3339 format. - start_datetime (String): The STAC Item
start_datetimevalue, a string in RFC 3339 format, if that field exists; otherwise, thedatetimevalue. - end_datetime (String): The STAC Item
end_datetimevalue, a string in RFC 3339 format, if that field exists; otherwise, thedatetimevalue. - bbox.ll_lon (Number): The lower left (southwest) longitude of the Item bounding box
- bbox.ll_lat (Number): The lower left (southwest) latitude of the Item bounding box
- bbox.ur_lon (Number): The upper right (northeast) longitude of the Item bounding box
- bbox.ur_lat (Number): The upper right (northeast) latitude of the Item bounding box
- cloud_cover (Number): The STAC Item
eo:cloud_covervalue, a floating point value between 0 and 100. - status (String): A value of either
createdorupdated, as to whether the Item was newly-ingested (created) or updated an existing Item (updated).
Note that for the bounding box, the abbreviations lower left (ll) and upper right (ur) are used to describe the bounding box, even though it is more accurate to describe them using cardinal directions. This is sometimes confusing, as in the case with an antimerdian-crossing scene where the "lower left" point has a larger longitude coordinate than the "upper right" point.
The SNS notification "Message" field is the STAC Item that was ingested.
The following CloudFormation template is an example of an SQS Queue with a subscription to the Earth Search SNS topic.
AWSTemplateFormatVersion: "2010-09-09"
Description: A sample template
Parameters:
EarthSearchPublishTopicArn:
Description: Earth Search Publish SNS Topic ARN
Type: String
Default: arn:aws:sns:us-west-2:608149789419:cirrus-es-prod-publish
EarthSearchPublishTopicRegion:
Description: Earth Search Publish SNS Topic Region
Type: String
Default: us-west-2
Resources:
IngestEarthSearch:
Type: AWS::SQS::Queue
Properties:
RedrivePolicy:
deadLetterTargetArn: !GetAtt IngestEarthSearchDLQ.Arn
maxReceiveCount: 5
VisibilityTimeout: 3600 # seconds, 6x function timeout
IngestEarthSearchQueuePolicy:
Type: AWS::SQS::QueuePolicy
Properties:
Queues:
- !Ref IngestEarthSearch
PolicyDocument:
Version: "2012-10-17"
Statement:
- Effect: Allow
Action: sqs:SendMessage
Resource: !GetAtt IngestEarthSearch.Arn
Principal:
Service: sns.amazonaws.com
Condition:
ArnEquals:
aws:SourceArn: !Ref EarthSearchPublishTopicArn
IngestEarthSearchDLQ:
Type: AWS::SQS::Queue
IngestEarthSearchSnsSubscription:
Type: AWS::SNS::Subscription
Properties:
Protocol: sqs
Endpoint: !GetAtt IngestEarthSearch.Arn
Region: !Ref EarthSearchPublishTopicRegion
TopicArn: !Ref EarthSearchPublishTopicArn
FilterPolicyScope: MessageAttributes
FilterPolicy:
collection:
- sentinel-2-c1-l2a
- landsat-c2-l2
bbox.ll_lon:
- numeric:
- ">="
- 51.9
bbox.ll_lat:
- numeric:
- ">="
- 16.6
bbox.ur_lon:
- numeric:
- "<="
- 59.9
bbox.ur_lat:
- numeric:
- "<="
- 26.4As part of Earth Search, Cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) are generated for the
Sentinel-2 Collection 1 Level-2A dataset from the ESA/Singergize JPEG 2000 files.
These are referenced in the
Earth Search API Collection sentinel-2-c1-l2a. This data is stored in the
S3 Bucket e84-earth-search-sentinel-data and an S3 Inventory is generated into
S3 Bucket e84-earth-search-sentinel-data-inventory.
The STAC Collections in the API are detailed below along with specific notes on each dataset including any known issues. Please file an issue in this repository for any new issues, such as incorrect metadata. Some Collections do have missing Items due to several issues and these are being worked on.
| Collection | Public Dataset | stactools package | # of Items |
|---|---|---|---|
cop-dem-glo-30 |
Copernicus DEM | cop-dem | ~ 26,000 |
cop-dem-glo-90 |
Copernicus DEM | cop-dem | ~ 26,000 |
landsat-c2-l2 |
USGS Landsat | landsat | ~8.5 million |
naip |
NAIP | naip | ~1.2 million |
sentinel-1-grd |
Sentinel-1 GRD | sentinel1 | ~2.7 million |
sentinel-2-c1-l2a |
tbd | sentinel2 | ~15 million |
sentinel-2-l1c |
Sentinel-2 | sentinel2 | ~21.7 million |
sentinel-2-l2a |
Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-2 COGS | sentinel2 | ~21.7 million |
The Copernicus DEM data is available in two different Collections with the only difference being the resolution: 30 meter vs 90 meter.
The landsat-c2-l2 Collection consists of Items pointing to the authoritative source of Landsat data,
accessible through the official USGS Landsat STAC API. The Earth
Search API combines two USGS Collections from that API: landsat-c2l2-sr (Surface Reflectrance for optical bands)
and landsat-c2l2-st (Surface Temperature for thermal bands) as a matter of convenience when using
both the optical and thermal bands.
Note that while the majority of Items contain both thermal and optical, some Items contain only optical with
no thermal bands. There are no Items with only thermal data. This is reflected in the Item property instruments,
an array indicating the sensors used. For example for Landsat-9 instruments will be either ['oli', 'tirs'],
or just ['oli']. Each Landsat Item also contains links back to the USGS Item(s).
The Landsat ID in Earth Search is different from the USGS ID in that it does not include a processing date, thereby ensuring the ID does not change for a given scene.
- When USGS reprocesses an Item, the newly processed datafiles replace the old Items in Earth Search (because the ID is the same). However there are some historical scenes in the index that do not point to the most recently processed scene, which means the assets contain dead links.
NAIP data is released by year and by each individual state. Most states have a 2-3 year release cycle, although North Dakota
is released yearly. Occasionally, some data cannot be collected for a given year due to
weather or snow, so the data is collected in the following year. For example, some areas
of New York for the NAIP collection year 2021 were not collected until 2022, so their
datatime reflect 2022 instead of 2021. To find data for a specific NAIP year, use a
Query Extension filter on the the STAC Item property naip:year for the NAIP year and
naip:state for the state.
Prior to 2021, NAIP was only collected for the Contiguous United States (CONUS) only, however, starting in 2021, Hawaii is also included. Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands were also collected for 2021, but have not yet been published.
The Sentinel-1 data is the Ground Range Detected amplitude-only data. Sentinel-1 is not distributed as gridded data, so the images can vary substantially in coverage and size. The original footprints of the scenes were found to not be very accurate, so as part of the indexing process for Earth Search, new footprints are generated.
The Sentinel-2 Collections represent the vast majority of Items stored in Earth Search, especially since both the Level-1 and Level-2 are included. The Level-1 data is the original JPEG 2000 files, and the Level-2 data includes a set of assets for the original JPEG 2000 files, as well as a set of assets for the Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) versions.
Starting Jan 25, 2022, the Copernicus program started processing using a new version of software, called the Baseline 04.00. Part of the changes included an offset that needs to be applied to the data when read in order to compare to any pre-04.00 processed data.
As part of the conversion to COGs, the offset has been applied to some of the Items. To determine if the offset has been applied
to the COGs or not, examine the asset of interest. The raster:bands field has fields for both scale and offset. If the
offset is anything other than 0, then it should be applied after the scale factor to correct the data.
- Most of the scenes crossing the antimeridian are excluded from the Catalog. This issue has been resolved in the stactools-sentinel2 package by splitting polygons crossing the antimeridian. The historical scenes will be indexed in the coming months.
- There are some missing Items from the Catalog because currently the L1 and L2 data are ingested together and in some cases there is no available L1 data which causes the ingest to fail. The causes for this are being explored and we will likely move to ingesting the L2 data regardless if L1 is available or not.
The Sentinel-2 Collection 1 L2A (sentinel-2-c1-l2a) is intended to eventually replace the other Sentinel-2 L2A collection (sentinel-2-l2a). Items in this collection only contain assets referring to COGs of data processed to at least baseline 5.0. However, as of April 2024, the ESA reprocessing of the entire archive to baseline 5.0 is incomplete, so the time periods of Nov 2016 to Nov 2019 and 2022 are missing. It is unknown when this process will be completed.
The Earth Search API is made available as a best effort by Element 84. While it is not possible for the public to aid in the operation of the pipeline, the creation of the STAC metadata uses repos from the open-source stactools-packages organization. PRs are welcome to these repositories which may eventually make their way into Earth Search depending on their backwards compatability.
The best way to contribute is to provide feedback via issues in this repository.
- Earth Search STAC API v1 released.