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Quick Start

Installing earthaccess

The latest release of earthaccess can be installed with mamba, conda or pip. We recommend using mamba because it is faster.

You will need Python 3.8 or higher installed.

Using mamba

mamba install -c conda-forge earthaccess

Using conda

conda install -c conda-forge earthaccess

Using pip

python -m pip install earthaccess

Check earthaccess is installed

This should run seamlessly (fingers-crossed). To check earthaccess is correctly installed you can start a python interpreter (either python or ipython) and run the following code.

$ python
Python 3.12.1 | packaged by conda-forge | (main, Dec 23 2023, 08:03:24) [GCC 12.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import earthaccess
>>> earthaccess.__version__
'0.8.2'

Note: Your python and earthaccess versions may be different.

Get Data in 3 Steps

earthaccess allows you to search for and access data in as little as three steps. We give a very quick example below. These three steps allow you to get data whether you are working in the cloud or on your local laptop or workstation. Read the User Guide for more information. If you want to quickly find how to perform some common searches and data access, take a look at our how-to guides in the sidebar.

The only requirement to use this library is to open a free account with NASA Earthdata Login.

The following steps can be executed in a Python interpreter, a Python file, or a Jupyter notebook.

Step 1: Login

To access NASA data, you have to login using your Earth Data Login credentials. You can register for a free Earth Data Login account here.

By default, earthaccess will look for your Earth Data Login credentials in a .netrc file, or in environment variables EARTHDATA_USERNAME and EARTHDATA_PASSWORD. If you don't have either of these set up, you can login manually. See Authenticating to learn how to create a .netrc file or environment variables.

import earthaccess

earthaccess.login()

Step 2: Search for data

As an example, we'll search for the "ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Land Ice Height", or ATL06, dataset from the NASA ICESat-2 mission.

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name='ATL06',
    bounding_box=(-10, 20, 10, 50),
    temporal=("1999-02", "2019-03"),
    count=10
)

Step 3. Download the files

Once you have found the files you want, you can download them to your local machine.

files = earthaccess.download(results, "./local_folder")

Note

This will download the data to a directory named local_folder in your current working directory (the directory from which you are running this code, also known as .). If that directory doesn't exist, it will be created automatically.

Data can also be opened in-memory with earthaccess.open(). See our API docs for more.

We value your feedback! We want to hear all about your experience using earthaccess. Even if you're not noticing any issues or bugs, we want to know... what annoys you? What feels great? We'd love if you would share an experience report with us!