NASA Earthdata Catalog

Author

Eli Holmes (NOAA)

📘 Learning Objectives

  1. Get an account at NASA Earthdata
  2. Find collection information from the Darthdata catalog.

Summary

In this tutorial we will get to know the NASA Earthdata catalog and assets. And learn how to get information on data collections.

Earthdata Login account

An Earthdata Login account is required to access data from NASA Earthdata. Please visit https://urs.earthdata.nasa.gov to register and manage your Earthdata Login account. This account is free to create and only takes a moment to set up.

Once you have an account, test that you can log in.

import earthaccess
auth = earthaccess.login()
# are we authenticated?
if not auth.authenticated:
    # ask for credentials and persist them in a .netrc file
    auth.login(strategy="interactive", persist=True)

The Earthdata catalog search page

How can we find the shortname, concept_id, and doi for collections not in the table above?. We can find these on the NASA Earthdata catalog search page and data collection pages.

Let’s head to https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search. Here is the front page. On the top left, you can type in text to search and below you can filter on specific criteria, like sensor. On the right are lists of data collections. Let’s look at the information for a data collection.

Data collection details

Here I did a search for “MUR-JPL-L4-GLOB-v4.1” and the GHRSST Level 4 dataset is at the top. In the far right, you see 3 dots (in the red box). Click on that to go to the collection details page.

The collection details page has some keywords that can be used to specify a collection. In the red box, is the shortname, version and doi.

Click on the View More Info to find the collection concept_id.

Example of some collection identifiers

Shortname Collection Concept ID DOI
MUR-JPL-L4-GLOB-v4.1 C1996881146-POCLOUD 10.5067/GHGMR-4FJ04
AVHRR_OI-NCEI-L4-GLOB-v2.1 C2036881712-POCLOUD 10.5067/GHAAO-4BC21

Conclusion

This concludes the introduction to the NASA Earthdata collection identifiers. With the information in the table above we will use the Python earthaccess library to search the files in collections.