When working with satellite imagery we have to take into account the spatial and temporal scale. The selection and processing of remote sensing data products on a specific area over a certain period of time requires a great amount of time and computational resources. We have explored the web application AppEEARS from the USGS to download land cover images (MCD12Q1v006) over a specific area and time range. The tutorial covers all the steps from creating a polygon in QGIS3 as Geojson, upload into the webapp, the subsequent instructions to download the files, displaying the data in QGIS3 and review the pixel values correspondances.

About AppEEARS

It is a new webapp to download data or at least new for us. We were used to ECHO Reverb but the website is no longer available. Another option is Earthdata Search that is more feature rich but can’t provide clipped data.

On the advantages from AppEEARS is the simplicity, the capacity to work with Geojson (instead of zipping a ESRI shapefile), the option to download only certains layers from a dataset, and the clipped dataproducts on some projections. On the disadvantages are processing time to deliver the images; on business days the email with the download links can take 8 hours, while on weekends it takes only 15 minutes.