Add Global Surface Water Explorer to Riverscapes Context OR Its own project

joewheaton commented 2 years ago

@jtgilbert I'd like you to work with @MattReimer or @philipbaileynar to figure out how to do this. We'll talk about when and priorities later. @lauren-herbine you will like this.

Hervé and Barbara turned me on to this Global Surface Water Explorer. This could be our first, low hanging fruit, global functionality. It is basically a 30 m LANDSAT derivative.

What they Have

Yes, it really only works well for big rivers, but it is global in coverage and really cool on the multi-temporal. The layers include:

Water occurrence (sometimes water → always water)
Water Occurrence Change Intensity
Water Seasonality (seasonal → permanent)
Annual Water Recurrence (1984-2020)
Water Transitions
Maximum Water Occurrence

There are also some really cool Ëarth Time-Lapse basemaps, that are worth seeing if we can get.

What We Want

They have a great explorer (web map for a specific audience), and we don't need to or want to duplicate that. What we want to do is:

Promote it and highlight it (makes them look good, and makes us look global)
Make it available as context (i.e. Basemap in RAVE),
Package as its own Global Water Project for a watershed extent (or custom extent).
Be able to let people grab what they need and do analyses of the derivatives in QRiS (i.e. add to scratch space) .

Lots of Ways to Get Data

I can't tell if they have an API (they do have a Python script for downloading so it makes me think maybe), but the data can be downloaded in a variety of ways. What is also cool is they have really good metadata we can just ingest and qml and lyr files all pre packaged for the datasets. So if we went the route of making riverscapes projects for these, they would be really straight forward to curate symbology and business logic for.

joewheaton commented 2 years ago

@lauren-herbine this should give you some ideas (at least for the big rivers) for nice easy GNAT moving window metrics.

jtgilbert commented 1 year ago

added all GSWE rasters to RSContext b14ead643a6fa1407c88f74b81d3f4d314802098

Riverscapes / riverscapes-tools