earthaccess: Python Library for NASA Earthdata APIs

[danielfromearth]

Submitting Author: (@danielfromearth)
All current maintainers: (@andypbarrett, @battistowx, @jrbourbeau, @itcarroll, @chuckwondo, @mfisher87, @danielfromearth, @jhkennedy, @betolink, @jules32, @JessicaS11, @asteiker, @Sherwin-14)
Package Name: "earthaccess"
One-Line Description of Package: "earthaccess is a python library to search for, and download or stream NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code."
Repository Link: "https://github.com/earthaccess-dev/earthaccess"
Version submitted: "0.17.0"
EiC: TBD
Editor: TBD
Reviewer 1: TBD
Reviewer 2: TBD
Archive: TBD
JOSS DOI: TBD
Version accepted: TBD
Date accepted (month/day/year): TBD

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Description

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earthaccess is an open-source Python library that unifies the discovery, authentication, and access steps for working with NASA Earth science data into a few lines of Python. These steps have historically required researchers to navigate separate systems, data provider-specific APIs, and substantial boilerplate code. Built around NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), which distributes over 100 petabytes of satellite imagery, climate records, atmospheric measurements, and other geospatial datasets, earthaccess handles authenticating with NASA's Earthdata Login service, searching NASA's Common Metadata Repository, and retrieving data via HTTPS download, direct cloud access, or streaming into analysis-ready formats — so that scientists can move from question to analysis without wrestling with infrastructure.

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  • Data retrieval
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earthaccess falls under the "Data Retrieval" category because it focuses specifically on retrieving scientific datasets from NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), streamlining the NASA-specific authentication flows and cloud-vs-on-premises access logic that would otherwise require researchers to write substantial boilerplate code to go from logging in, to searching for data, to accessing the actual data.

The target audience includes Earth scientists, remote sensing researchers, climate modelers, hydrologists, ecologists, and any researcher or educator who needs to work with NASA Earth science data. Scientific applications span any workflow that begins with accessing NASA Earthdata — from downloading TEMPO air quality observations for atmospheric chemistry studies, to streaming SWOT satellite altimetry for hydrology research, to constructing applications that process thousands of data files for large-scale climate analyses.

Several Python packages address parts of this workflow: python-cmr wraps the CMR search API but does not handle authentication or data download; harmony-py provides server-side subsetting and reformatting but not direct data access; and icepyx provides specialized tools for ICESat-2 data only. earthaccess is unique in integrating search, authentication, and access (both HTTPS download and direct S3 streaming) into a single, mission-agnostic abstraction that works across NASA EOSDIS data holdings.

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