developmentseed / developmentseed/landsat-util

Landsat downloading questions

Open
#188 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Python
Stars
698
Forks
144
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

According to the docs, AWS S3 offers the each band individually, while Google Storage has all the bands into one scene compressed archive.

Before when downloading from Google Storage, they would always give a `.tar.bz`. However now when downloading from Amazon, they only give individual bands.

Is there a way to specify to always download a `.tar.bz` even from Amazon?

---

Ok assuming the API has changed, so we can no longer get `.tar.bz` from landsat-util, I have another question.

A while ago, I downloaded `LC80990832016037LGN01`, and this was fetched from google storage. Uncompressing and untarring it gave me a file `LC80990832016037LGN01_B1.TIF`. This file was 114 MiB.

However when I try to download `LC80990832016037LGN01` from landsat-util now using AWS S3 as a source, I need to specify `--bands="1"`, the new `LC80990832016037LGN01_B1.TIF` was instead only 57 MiB.

Is the source from AWS S3 preprocessed or compressed in some way?

Looking at using `file` tool, it explains:

```
$ file direct_aws.tif
direct_aws.tif: TIFF image data, little-endian, direntries=17, height=7881, bps=16, compression=deflate, PhotometricIntepretation=BlackIsZero, width=7811
$ file landsat_google.tif
landsat_google.tif: TIFF image data, little-endian
```

Which shows that the AWS version is compressed with `deflate`. And we get a bit more metadata which is nice. However afterwards, I checked the 2 files inside QGIS, and the max band of the google supplied file is 11997, while the max band from the supposedly same file on AWS was only 11502. It seems that the 2 files are not equivalent even after decompression?

---

I also noticed sometimes there's wild throughput differences between downloading from landsat-util and direct from AWS S3 http://landsat-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/ Even while downloading the same file at the same time.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.