Download Google Earth Engine Collection to Local Drive

Question

I am fairly new to both python and Google Earth Engine, so please bear with me if the following question is kind of stupid because it ignores some basic knowledge.

I would like to process some Sentinel-2 hyperspectral images available from Google Earth Engine, but, as I said I am not very familiar with python. My idea was, therefore, to use python to get the images to my drive (in some kind of standardized format such as netcdf, BSQ, etc.) and then process them locally with MATLAB for which I already have an analysis pipeline.

Nevertheless I can't seem to find any way to do that: all the info I find clearly state how to export the image to Google Drive (I can do it and it works), but there's no clear info on how to get it on the local hard drive. Is that possible?

Thanks for the answers!

Jeremy Malczyk · Accepted Answer

Because Google Earth Engine data exports are asyncronous, the destinations are also cloud-based. Your options are Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, or new assets in Earth Engine. Cloud Storage is generally the best option when it comes to exporting many files, as there is a handy command-line interface, gsutil to download (and upload) in bulk.

But if all you need is Sentinel-2 imagery, you can download directly from the public Cloud Storage bucket that Google maintains for this. See: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/public-datasets/sentinel-2

Data from this bucket can be downloaded using the gsutil tool, which will allow you to pull data directly to your hard drive.

Pdavis327 · Answer

You can't directly export it locally. According to https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/exporting#to-drive,

You can export images, map tiles, tables and video from Earth Engine.
  The exports can be sent to your Google Drive account, to Google Cloud
  Storage or to a new Earth Engine asset.

The easiest way is to export to drive, and then download locally from there.

Qiusheng Wu · Answer

You can export an ImageCollection to Google Drive using only one line of code with the geemap Python package. Check out this notebook example.
geemap.ee_export_image_collection_to_drive(collection, folder='export', scale=10)

Download Google Earth Engine Collection to Local Drive

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