uavsar-pytools 0.3.3

Tools to download and convert ground projected UAVSAR images.

uavsar_pytools

Python tools to download and convert binary Uavsar images from the Alaska Satellite Facility and Jet Propulsion Laboratory databases. Developed by Zachary Keskinen and Jack Tarricone with guidance from Dr. Hans Peter Marshall of Boise State University, Micah Johnson with m3works, and Micah Sandusky with m3works.

Installing

This package is installable with pip. In the terminal enter the following command:

pip install uavsar_pytools

Authorization

You will need a .netrc file in your home directory. This is a special file that stores passwords and usernames to be accessed by programs. If you are already registered at either the alaska satellite facility or jet propulsion laboratory skip step 1. Otherwise:

1. If you need a username and password register at link.

2. In a python terminal or notebook enter:

from uavsar_pytools.uavsar_tools import create_netrc
create_netrc()

You will be asked to prompted to enter your username and password and a netrc file will be automatically generated for you. This file will be accessed during downloading and searching for Uavsar images. You will only need to generate this file once on your computer.

Usage

The fundamental class of uavsar_pytools is the UavsarScene. This class is used for downloading, unzipping, and converting binary UAVSAR files into Geotiffs in WGS84. In order to use the class you will need to instantiate an instance of the class to hold your specific url and the image data. Please see the included tutorial and code snippet below. After instantiating the class you can call scene.url_to_tiffs() to fully download and convert the Uavsar images into analysis ready tiffs. The two required inputs are a url to an ASF or JPL zip file (if looking to download a single image see UavsarImage in the included notebooks) and that has been ground referenced (must have a .grd or _grd in the name) along with a directory that you want to store the image files in.

from uavsar_pytools.UavsarScene import UavsarScene
zip_url = 'https://datapool.asf.alaska.edu/INTERFEROMETRY_GRD/UA/INTERFEROGRAM_OR_POLSAR_GRD.zip'
image_directory = '~/directory/to/store/images/'
scene = UavsarScene(url = zip_url, work_dir= image_directory) #instantiating an instance of the UavsarScene class.
scene.url_to_tiffs()

You will now have a folder of analysis ready tiff images in WGS84 from the provided url in your specificed work directory.

If you are interested in working with each image's numpy array the class has an scene.images property that contains the type, description, and numpy array for each image in the zip file. This is available after running scene.url_to_tiffs().

print(scene.image[0]['type'] # figure out the type of the first image
scene.images[0]['array'] # get the first image numpy array for analysis

For quick checks to visualize the data there is also a convenience method scene.show(i = 1) that allows you to quickly visualize the first image, or by iterating on i = 2,3,4, etc all the images in the zip file. This method is only available after converting binary images to array with scene.url_to_tiffs().

Finding URLs for your images

The provided jupyter notebook tutorial in the notebooks folder will walk you through generating a bounding box for your area of interest and finding urls through the asf_search api. However if you can also use the vertex website. After drawing a box and selecting UAVSAR from the platform selection pane (circled in red below) you will get a list of search results. Click on the ground projected image you want to download and right click on the download link (circled in orange below). Select copy link and you will have copied your relevant zip url.

Need more help?

The notebook folder in this repository has example notebooks for how to utilize this repository or reach out with questions, features, bugs, or anything else.