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NASA Earthdata — introduction#

NASA Earthdata is the public gateway to the EOSDIS archive — petabytes of Earth-observation data spread across twelve Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs). The earthlens.earthdata backend reaches nine user-relevant DAACs through a single Earthdata Login (EDL) account and the earthaccess client, which wraps NASA's Common Metadata Repository (CMR) search and the per-DAAC download / in-region S3 access:

DAAC CMR provider Flagship products
PO.DAAC POCLOUD MUR SST, SWOT, GRACE-FO, Jason-3 / Sentinel-6
NSIDC NSIDC_CPRD ICESat-2, SMAP, BedMachine, sea-ice CDR
LP DAAC LPCLOUD MODIS, VIIRS, ASTER, ECOSTRESS, EMIT, GEDI, NASADEM
OB.DAAC OB_CLOUD PACE, ocean colour
GES DISC GES_DISC MERRA-2, GPM IMERG, GLDAS, OCO-2/3, AIRS, TEMPO
LAADS LAADS VIIRS Black Marble, MODIS L1
ASF ASF Sentinel-1, ALOS, NISAR, OPERA
ORNL DAAC ORNL_CLOUD Daymet, GEDI L4B
ASDC LARC_CLOUD CERES, MISR, CALIPSO

This page orients the backend. For the hands-on walkthrough see Usage; for credentials see Authentication; the curated dataset list and the maintenance tooling are on the Catalog page; the rendered API is the Reference page.

Why it matters here — the per-dataset output kind#

Every other earthlens backend emits one fixed output shape: CHC, ERA5, CMEMS, and ECMWF write gridded rasters; FDSN writes vector events. Earthdata cannot: its holdings span

  • gridded raster (GPM IMERG, MUR SST, MODIS, EMIT, OPERA),
  • point / profile vector (GEDI L4A footprints, ICESat-2 ATL06/08 photon products),
  • and plain tabular (some ORNL field-campaign CSV).

So EarthData is the first backend whose OUTPUT_KIND is resolved per request from the catalog row, not declared as a fixed class attribute. The EarthLens facade reads that per-instance value when it decides whether to forward an aggregate= request (raster only — see Usage).

What the MVP does (and defers)#

The backend fetches whole native granules: it searches CMR for the collections you name, scoped to your bounding box and time window, then either downloads them over HTTPS (earthaccess.download, the safe default anywhere) or — when you run inside AWS us-west-2 and the collection is cloud-hosted — streams them from S3 with rotating credentials (earthaccess.open).

Server-side spatial / variable subsetting (Harmony) and ASF's richer InSAR stack search are deferred to a later release; see Catalog → deferred features. Because of that, the band names in your request are informational for a whole-granule fetch — you receive the entire granule.

Python version note#

earthaccess >= 0.18 requires Python ≥ 3.12, even though earthlens core targets ≥ 3.11. Installing earthlens[earthdata] on 3.11 will not resolve earthaccess; the other backends are unaffected. See Authentication.