Earth Engine

Our API is built using Google Earth Engine infrastructure. As such, many of the same constraints and geospatial technicalities apply.

Note: assets must be shared with [e-mail] to be used by the API.

DO NOT add [e-mail] to the IAM Permission of any GCP Project.

Signing Up

Anyone can sign up for Google Earth Engine. GEE is free for non-commercial and non-operational use. To sign up, you will need to register a cloud project which can be done here. Make sure that your project is registered to your GEE account by visiting the GEE code editor and following any steps if you see a warning sign under your profile image. Once you have been accepted you will receive an email with additional information. G-suite accounts may have automatically create a GEE for you similar to the way Google Drive is created.

Uploading Shapefiles

To upload and manage geospatial datasets, use the Asset Manager in the Code Editor which can be found on the Assets tab at the left side of the Code Editor. See Importing Table Data for instructions on uploading table data. Your assets are initially private, but may be shared with others.

Datasets uploaded through the Asset Manager become private assets in a folder owned by your user account. The space allocated to each user account for storing assets is limited by a quota. Quota usage is measured by the total number and the compressed size of stored assets. To see how much of your asset quota is in use, hover over users/username and click the data_usage icon.

Sharing Assets

In order for the API to access information from you Earth Engine assets you must grant READ permission to [e-mail]. A tutorial can be found in the Earth Engine documentation here.

Linking Your Account

If you have an existing Google Earth Engine account, click when visiting your Account Dashboard and grant access to the requested scopes to leverage your Earth Engine resources with OpenET. You will need to enter your cloud project id information on your profile page near the bottom under the Cloud Project ID section and hit save.

Once completed, all raster processing will be handled by you. This means no queue, the ability to monitor and cancel tasks, an expanded quota, and private exporting to your Google Drive. This will apply a 4x multiplier to your account's Quota.

The default export destination with be a folder at the root of your Google Drive called OpenET Exports. You can monitor and cancel requests with the Earth Engine Task Manager.

To revoke access at anytime, visit your Google account settings. Under the Third-party Apps with Account Access tab select OpenET and click REMOVE ACCESS. Finally, you will need to remove the cloud project id from you profile page.

Public Data Catalog

OpenET publishes raster datasets to the Google Earth Engine public data catalog. Data is updated periodically. For very large data extractions which exceed quota limits, this is a great option for retrieval.