# STAC and Earth Systems datasets

**URL:** <https://discourse.pangeo.io/t/stac-and-earth-systems-datasets/1472>\
**Category:** Data\
**Created:** [May 12, 2021, 2:05pm UTC](https://discourse.pangeo.io/t/stac-and-earth-systems-datasets/1472 "2021-05-12T14:05:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 20

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![TomAugspurger](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/discourse.pangeo.io/tomaugspurger/32/21_2.png) [@TomAugspurger](https://discourse.pangeo.io/u/TomAugspurger)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2021, 1:41pm UTC](https://discourse.pangeo.io/t/stac-and-earth-systems-datasets/1472/20 "2021-07-14T13:41:58Z")

</div>

The datasets that motivated this are now cataloged on our site. A few links:

1. STAC Collection for Hawaii Daymet at daily frequency: [https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/stac/v1/collections/daymet-daily-hi](https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/stac/v1/collections/daymet-daily-hi)
2. The HTML summary, generated from that STAC collection: [Planetary Computer](https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/dataset/daymet-monthly-hi)
3. We did the same for TerraClimate ([STAC](https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/stac/v1/collections/terraclimate), [HTML](https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/dataset/terraclimate)).

A few things to note:

- This models the datasets as Collections. My primary use case was generating STAC objects that could be cataloged at the same level as Landast, Sentinel, etc. at [Planetary Computer](https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/catalog)
- The STAC collections were generated using [xstac](https://github.com/TomAugspurger/xstac) which needs to be moved out of my personal GitHub, but should be somewhat functional
- The STAC collection includes (duplicates) much of the data available in the Zarr store like the dimensions, coordinates, shapes, chunks. This is all used to build the HTML summary
- We noticed a need for communicating fsspec / xarray-specific things, which we’ve written up as a small STAC extension call [xarray-assets](https://github.com/stac-extensions/xarray-assets). The usage from a typical pangeo stack would be something like

```python
>>> import fsspec, xarray, pystac
>>> collection = pystac.read_file("examples/collection.json")
>>> asset = collection.assets["example"]
>>> asset.media_type # use this to choose `xr.open_zarr` vs. `xr.open_dataset`
'application/vnd+zarr'
>>> store = fsspec.get_mapper(asset.href, **asset.properties["xarray:storage_options"])
>>> ds = xarray.open_zarr(store, **asset.properties["xarray:open_kwargs"])
>>> ds

```

(or people would just use `intake-stac`, which would use this pattern internally). The main point is you can go from STAC → DataArray without having to know anything other than the URL to the Collection and the name of the asset.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.pangeo.io/t/stac-and-earth-systems-datasets/1472)._