Direct access

Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 Bucket

Digital Earth Africa data is stored on Amazon Web Services in several publicly accessible S3 buckets.

These buckets are:

  • deafrica-landsat

  • deafrica-sentinel-1

  • deafrica-sentinel-2

  • deafrica-input-datasets

  • deafrica-services

For information on where products can be found, see Data Catalogue.

More information on inventory and notification services for some of the buckets can be found on their respective datasets pages on the Digital Earth Africa Registry of Open Data on AWS

These buckets are in the AWS region af-south-1 (Capetown).

To list the contents of a bucket using the AWS Command Line:

aws s3 ls --region=af-south-1 s3://deafrica-services/ --no-sign-request

Note that you will need to export the environment variable export AWS_S3_ENDPOINT=s3.af-south-1.amazonaws.com to be able to use some tools such as GDAL to access the data.

Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COG)

Most of the products in Digital Earth Africa are available as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) files.

For more information on using these files, see the Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF site.

For using COGs on S3 with QGIS, see the tutorial How to read a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF with QGIS.

To convert an S3 path to a direct HTTPS link that you can use in many applications, use the following format: https://<bucket>.s3.<region>.amazonaws.com/<key> where bucket is the name of the bucket, the region is ``af-south-1` and key is the path to the file.

Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC)

The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification provides a common language to describe a range of geospatial information, so it can more easily be indexed and discovered. A “spatiotemporal asset” is any file that represents information about Earth captured in a certain space and time.

The DE Africa STAC endpoint is:

https://explorer.digitalearth.africa/stac/

For more information, see the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog site and the DE Africa odc-stac example.