Accessing data

Data Access Overview

The are two access methods available in earthaccess. The first method is download, which downloads a file or files to a local computer or workstation. The second method is open, which streams data directly into memory (analogous to streaming a TV show or film). This approach is best used while working in the cloud next to the data (AWS region us-west-2).

Authentication

Prerequisite reminder

A NASA Earthdata Login is required for all data access methods, including download and direct cloud access.

Authenticate with your Earthdata Login profile

The following steps assume you have imported the earthaccess library.

import earthaccess

By default, earthaccess.login() will look for a .netrc or environment variables first. If neither of these are found, it will prompt you to enter your username and password. The three methods are described in the earthaccess documentation here.

auth = earthaccess.login()
Enter your Earthdata Login username: your_username
Enter your Earthdata password:

Identifiying data of interest

Once you have identified the files you are interested in using earthaccess.search_data,

files = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name = 'ATL06',
    version = '006',
    bounding_box = (-134.7,58.9,-133.9,59.2),
    temporal = ('2020-03-01','2020-04-30'),
)

you can access those files.

Downloading data

download = earthaccess.download(files)

QUEUEING TASKS | : 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 4/4 [00:00<00:00, 1706.04it/s]
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download

[PosixPath(/current/working/directory/data/2026-01-23-50429a/ATL06_20200310121504_11420606_006_01.h5'),
 PosixPath('/current/working/directory/data/2026-01-23-50429a/ATL06_20200312233336_11800602_006_01.h5'),
 PosixPath('/current/working/directory/data/2026-01-23-50429a/ATL06_20200410220936_02350702_006_02.h5'),
 PosixPath('/current/working/directory/data/2026-01-23-50429a/ATL06_20200412104246_02580706_006_02.h5')]

By default files are downloaded to a sub-directory of the current working directory with a name similar to ./data/YYYY-MM-DD_UUID, where YYYY-MM-DD is the year, month and day of the current date, and UUID is a unique identifier. You can override this behaviour by setting the local_path keyword to a local directory.

download = earthaccess.download(files, local_path='/path/to/local/data/directory/')

Direct S3 access of data

Streaming is an efficient way to access data, without downloading and saving it to disk. This is especially useful if you are working in a shared cloud-hosted computing environment such as a Jupyter Hub or Google CoLab. For best performance, stream data to a cloud compute environment in the same region as where the data are stored to take advantage of the high bandwidth between the computing and storage environments. For NASA Earthdata, this is AWS region us-west-2.

Streaming data with the open method is very similar to download.

fileobjects = earthaccess.open(files)

QUEUEING TASKS | : 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 4/4 [00:00<00:00, 1706.04it/s]
PROCESSING TASKS | : 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 4/4 [00:13<00:00,  6.89s/it]
COLLECTING RESULTS | : 100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 4/4 [00:00<00:00, 26379.27it/s]

earthaccess.open returns a list of file-like objects. These can be used in the same way as a filepath with third-party applications such as xarray.

ds = xarray.open_mfdataset(fileobjects)

ds = xarray.open_dataset(fileobjects[0])