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Earth Search STAC API

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.

General Notes

Extensions Used

All the Earth Search STAC Items make use of the following extensions:

Additionally, the EO extension is used for multispectral data and the SAR extension is used for SAR data.

s3 vs http URLs

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

SNS Notifications of Items

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 datetime value, a string in RFC 3339 format.
  • start_datetime (String): The STAC Item start_datetime value, a string in RFC 3339 format, if that field exists; otherwise, the datetime value.
  • end_datetime (String): The STAC Item end_datetime value, a string in RFC 3339 format, if that field exists; otherwise, the datetime value.
  • 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_cover value, a floating point value between 0 and 100.
  • status (String): A value of either created or updated, 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:
              - "<="
              - 26.4

Sentinel-2 Collection 1 Level-2A S3 Data

As part of Earth Search, Cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) are generated for the Sentinel-2 Collection 1 Level-2A dataset from the ESA/Sinergise 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.

Collections

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

Copernicus DEM (cop-dem-glo-30 and cop-dem-glo-90)

The Copernicus DEM data is available in two different Collections with the only difference being the resolution: 30 meter vs 90 meter.

Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 (landsat-c2-l2)

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.

Known Issues

  • 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 (naip)

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.

Sentinel-1 (sentinel-1-grd)

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.

Sentinel-2 L1C and L2A (sentinel-2-l1c and sentinel-2-l2a)

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.

Gain/Offset in Items after Jan 25, 2022

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.

Known Issues

  • 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.

Sentinel-2 Collection 1 L2A (sentinel-2-c1-l2a)

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.

Contributions

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.

Updates

May 31, 2023

  • Earth Search STAC API v1 released.