xcube <> GoogleEarthEngine interface

[mkoenig3]

Hi folks,

we talked about this a while ago and Gunnar recommended to open a feature request so we don't forget about it.

I occasionally work with GoogleEarthEngine and found that Google's CloudScore+ product for Sentinel-2 works really well (https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/GOOGLE_CLOUD_SCORE_PLUS_V1_S2_HARMONIZED). I think it would be great to have access to this data outside of GEE, too.

I found the xee Python package which is an interface for xarray and GEE (https://github.com/google/Xee) but it appears to be rather slow and I wonder if there are plans to provide an xcube interface to GEE.

Cheers,
Marcel

[forman]

but it appears to be rather slow and I wonder if there are plans to provide an xcube interface to GEE.

Hi Marcel, how have you tested xee? Since it uses a Google Cloud API I guess the most appropriate way is to test it in an environment that is "close" to the data archives accessible through GEE.

If performance is the driver for your request, it may turn out that an xcube implementation may not be faster if executed in a non-Google infrastructure such as AWS or CDSE.

[forman]

FYI @gunbra32

[mkoenig3]

Hi Norman, I ran it on DeepESDL but I can give it another try on colab for comparison.
I was just surprised that it appears to be much slower compared to accessing data from Sentinel-Hub through xcube.