How to Download Assets from Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Overcome the Size Limitations
Learn a workaround that can be applied to avoid the annoying limitation set by Google to download contents directly to your local machine
Introduction
When I started using Google Earth Engine (GEE) back in 2018, I found it an amazing idea to have all the satellite imagery datasets in the cloud, and accessing them in such on-demand basis. Once we understand that the computations happen on the server side, through the Earth Engine API, and it is done “on-the-fly” for any region in the globe it is really game changing. Google announces planetary-scale analysis capabilities. And, in fact, it is.
However, if we need to interact with other datasets not available on their cloud or if we need to apply an algorithm that is not supported by their API, things are more challenging. Additionally, while the built-in code editor (javascript) is really quick to get started (for experimenting their API and visualizing the results), it is very limiting for a more heavy-use scenario. Additionally, using GEE from the Python API was not straightforward enough at the time. It seems that the geemap package developed by professor Qiusheng Wu from University of Tennessee…
