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Creating Sentinel 2 (Truly) Cloudless Mosaics with Microsoft Planetary Computer

Mask clouds (and cloud shadows) effectively on Microsoft Planetary Computer using S2 Cloudless layers from GEE with geeS2Downloader package

Maurício Cordeiro
Towards Data Science
6 min readJan 27, 2022
Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Introduction

Microsoft Planetary Computing is a good competitor to the well established Google Earth Engine in the geospatial arena. The possibility to access petabytes of satellite information without the need to download each image and the computational power provided by Dask clusters is a gamechanger for developing regional/global applications and research. Planetary Computer is still in preview (access request is required) but the possibility to use its computing HUB with open source tools like XARRAY and STAC is a good advantage (IMHO) over Google’s proprietary API.

Another advantage is that we don’t have to bother with size constraints like the ones in GEE that prevent us from accessing the values in a Numpy array format easily. Ok, I understand that the GEE’s concept is different and that is meant to force people to run the computations in the server-side (using the concept of lazy arrays), but there are times that it is just easier to access the data directly. In Planetary Computer it is even possible to download…

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Published in Towards Data Science

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Written by Maurício Cordeiro

Ph.D. Geospatial Data Scientist and water specialist at Brazilian National Water and Sanitation Agency. To get in touch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cordmaur/

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