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Data Catalog

The Planetary Computer provides key geospatial and conservation datasets, free of charge and powered by the Azure cloud. Visit the Data Catalog to discover what data is currently available and to review important metadata about their content, including what specific assets are included. Each dataset also includes runnable example code showing how to access and use the data with other Planetary Computer components.

Read more about how the Planetary Computer uses open-source tools to make finding and using our data easy and approachable.

Data Providers

The Planetary Computer could not exist without the upstream data providers who actually generate the data. In some cases, these upstream providers also ensure that the data is available on Azure.

This diagram shows the relationship between upstream data providers and the Planetary Computer, using the NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) program as a concrete example.

NODD Diagram

This diagram starts with NODD pushing data assets to Azure, represented by the green circle 1. At this point, the raw data are immediately available to anyone through the highly scalable Azure Blob Storage service. Users can access the data using whatever tool they want that can make HTTP requests to the Blob Storage endpoint. In the diagram, this is represented by the green diamond 1, showing a “plain” Azure user accessing an individual file using curl.

For some use cases, just having access to the raw data is sufficient. But to satisfy even more use cases, the Planetary Computer provides some additional assets and services on top of the raw data. This is shown on the right-hand side of the diagram.

First, the Planetary Computer might produce cloud-optimized versions of the same data; for example converting HDF5 files to Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF. In the diagram this is represented by the green circle 2a, which shows the Planetary Computer generating COGs and storing them in the goeseuwest-cogs storage container.

Second, the Planetary Computer provides services to make working with geospatial data much easier (depicted by the green circle 2b in the diagram).

To use the raw data pushed to Azure, users need to somehow know the naming convention of each data product, and parse it to find the data they want (green diamond 1). With the Planetary Computer’s STAC API, users can search the data using high-level concepts like date ranges, bounding boxes, and more (green diamond 2). In addition to the STAC API, the Planetary Computer provides a tile server for quickly visualizing the data on a map, which is used by our Explorer.

Finally, note that the STAC API also catalogs the raw data from the upstream data providers. So it’s not an “either-or”: users of the Planetary Computer can also use the raw data from the upstream data provider.

Access patterns

Most of our datasets are indexed and searchable using the open STAC specification. These search and access API endpoints lower the barrier to finding specific data you need over large spatial and temporal extents. The data itself is still stored on Azure Blob Storage and can be used with existing, familiar tools.

While not yet available to be searched by our STAC API, the Planetary Computer also hosts and documents dozens of additional datasets important to environmental sustainability and Earth science. These datasets can be used alongside the STAC indexed data, or any other data you have. We’ll be incorporating these important datasets into the STAC API over the coming months.

While freely accessible, we do require tokens to access some data sets. Read more about using tokens for data access.

Future plans

We are working with partners to develop and onboard new datasets into the Planetary Computer, and to make them discoverable and accessible through open APIs. We’re also developing features that will allow users to perform analysis and generate visualizations directly from the Data Catalog.

If you have feedback about our existing datasets, or are interested in seeing additional datasets, contact us at planetarycomputer@microsoft.com.