usgs-data-tool

This USGS Data Tool is used to download national datasets through their API. Currently, only DEM (Digital Elevation Maps) and LiDAR dataset downloads are supported within this repository, but I am open to merge requests and collaboration to get further datasets and specifications in! More possible options can be found on the USGS TNM API documenation

Setup

The only prerequisite to installing is ensuring conda is installed (note that this has only been texted on linux).

To install this repository, just clone and run: ./install.sh

This will download and setup a virtual environment where the usgs-download cli tool is set up for you.

Optionally, if you prefer to use a python virtual environment, you can run the the following script: ./install_with_venv.sh

Usage

The usgs-downloader has three required arguments:

1. --aoi: This is the Area Of Interest (i.e bounding box) to download the dataset. It requires minLon, minLat, maxLon, and a maxLat to create the boundary. These types of values can be obtained using websites like this

2. --type: This is the dataset type to download, which is currently either lidar or dem files

3. ouput-dir: Directory to save files. Each file type will be broken into the datatype (lidar, dem, etc) and the USGS project it came from. For example, lidar would like:

output_dir/
└── lidar/
    ├── project1/
    │   └── data1.laz
    └── project2/
        └── data1.laz

Provided below is an example of downloading DEM data:

usgs-download --aoi -84.45688 33.62848 -84.40212 33.65607 --type dem --output-dir test/

Use usgs-download -h for more options and usage.

API Configuration and Contributing

If you look at the file src/usgs_data.json you can see how I structured the API requests that get made for each dataset type.

For example, suppose you wanted to contribute add a new request for the NED dataset, the json could look like this:

"ned" : {
    "1/3 arc": {
        "usgs_name": "National Elevation Dataset (NED) 1/3 arc-second"
        "usgs_data_format": "GeoTIFF"
    }
    "1/9 arc" : {
        "usgs_name": "National Elevation Dataset (NED) 1/9 arc-second"
        "usgs_data_format": "GeoTIFF"
    }
}

The usgs_name is the real name that get's called from the API and the usgs_data_format is the format accepted for this dataset. See src/data_helpers/fetch_files.py for how this is properly used. Adding more to the json will require some modifications to the cli commands and how files are fetched. I plan on making src/data_helpers/fetch_files.py more generalizable in the future.

Attribution

1. This repo was originally inspired from this repo, but I just wanted to make it more expandable and easy to use with the USGS TNM API :)
2. This repo was built as part of a pipeline for an Autonoma project. Check out what we do, I think it is pretty cool :)