(I am an astronomer by training, and we generally look away from Earth!) So, as we often do, I started by scouring the internet for code snippets and advice on how to accomplish this goal.

I am admittedly not an expert with GIS data. It provides RGB images at 10m resolution.

My goal with this project is to download a full color (RGB) satellite image at decent resolution and save it to my computer in GeoTIFF format so that I can use it with various other mapping applications.Īfter trying a few different data sources for optical satellite images, it appears that ESA’s Sentinal S2 Surface Reflectance dataset is the best option for my typical needs. Some tutorials can be found here, and here is a helpful introduction to the API in Python. Within each dataset’s description there is a code snippet (typically in JavaScript) that shows how to access the dataset.

You can find a list of available datasets here. But I’ve found that the JavaScript tutorials can also be helpful since the syntax is very similar to Python. The online documentation for Earth Engine is a bit limited, especially for Python. In order to use the API you need to sign up. There is a Python API (and a JavaScript API) to access the service, which I will use here. Google has developed a fantastic (and free) tool to access imagery from a variety of Earth-facing satellites, called Earth Engine. You can find the full code on my GitHub repo, and I’ll break it down section by section below. This time I decided to write a generalizable Python script to download satellite images, and I want to share that code with you here. In the past I’ve found various ad hoc workarounds.

This is not the first time I’ve run into this issue. So, since these images exist online, I should be able to easily download a free tile image, perhaps a GeoTIFF image, centered on a major city like Chicago, right? Wrong. There are plenty of satellites in the sky mapping the Earth surface many of these make their images available for free, and of course we are all familiar with mapping utilities like Google maps. I figured that a simple Google search would easily return a place to download a ready-made image of the city with latitude and longitude embedded that I could use in my favorite geographic information system (GIS) application. Recently I went looking online for a satellite image of Chicago to use in an RCS workshop.

Download googleearthengine