Get satellite data
get_geo_dataRead-only
Get satellite-derived indicators aggregated over a country, one state/province, or a bounding box. Use for fires, emissions-based activity, rainfall, vegetation, temperature, and soil-moisture questions.
For a sub-national area, call one state/province at a time. Informal regions such as "north India" or "the Midwest" have no boundary, so cover them with one call per state or a bounding box; using the whole country answers a different question. Grid cells and fire detections are activity snapshots, never fire perimeters. For ndvi_s2 and *_tropomi grids, drop or flag cells with low valid_obs_share. Results include units, source attribution, and caveats; cite the attribution. External-provider calls can take about 30 seconds, and rainfall or grid calls can take longer.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| region | Yes | Region as an ISO3 code or country name ("IND" or "India"); "Country/State" or "ISO3/State" ("India/Punjab" or "CHN/Guangdong") for a state/province; or "bbox:west,south,east,north" in degrees. State/province boundaries are available for IND, CHN, IDN, VNM, THA, MYS, PHL, PAK, BGD, LKA, MMR, KHM, NPL, KOR, JPN, TWN, and USA. | |
| dataset | Yes | Satellite dataset. One of: - "fires_viirs": active fire detections and fire radiative power (NASA FIRMS, 2012->, one day behind). Covers crop-residue burning, forest fires, and flaring. - "no2_tropomi": tropospheric NO2 column (Sentinel-5P, 2018->, ~3 days), an industrial/traffic activity proxy. Check valid_obs_share; cloudy intervals below 0.2 are weakly supported. - "so2_tropomi": SO2 column (Sentinel-5P, 2018->, ~3 days) for coal power, smelting, refining, and volcanoes. Noisy away from strong sources; track trends rather than absolute background levels. - "co_tropomi": CO column (Sentinel-5P, 2018->, ~3 days) for biomass/crop burning and industrial combustion. CO drifts across borders and is seasonal, so compare the same season across years. - "aerosol_index_tropomi": UV aerosol index (Sentinel-5P, 2018->, ~3 days) for smoke, dust, and haze. It is dimensionless; sustained values above ~1 indicate heavy smoke or dust, and it works over clouds. - "ndvi_s2": cloud-masked vegetation NDVI (Sentinel-2, 2017->, ~2-5 days), a crop-condition signal. Check valid_obs_share and compare the same season across years. - "precip_chirps": gauge-calibrated rainfall (CHIRPS, 1981->, ~2 days, 50S-50N) for monsoon, drought, and flood risk. - "precip_imerg": rainfall totals (NASA IMERG V07 Late, 2000->, ~1-2 days, global at 0.1 degree). Use where CHIRPS has no coverage; daily and monthly values are rainfall totals. - "temperature_power": mean/max/min 2m air temperature (NASA POWER, 1981->, ~3 days) for heatwaves and energy demand. - "soil_moisture_power": root-zone soil wetness from 0 to 1 (NASA POWER, 1981->, ~3 days) for agricultural drought. - "wind_power": 10m wind speed, daily maximum, eastward and northward components, the direction the wind blows from, and a 0-1 steadiness score (NASA POWER, 1981->, ~3 days). Use it to separate weather from emission changes in air-pollution data and to trace where smoke comes from. - "humidity_power": 2m relative humidity in % (NASA POWER, 1981->, ~3 days), a weather control for haze and fine particles. NASA POWER serves MERRA-2 up to a cut-off date (2026-08-31 at the time of writing) and the GEOS-IT system after it. The two models sit at different levels, so a one-day step across that date in a POWER dataset is a model change, not weather. | |
| end_date | Yes | Inclusive end date in ISO YYYY-MM-DD format. | |
| resolution | No | Optional fires_viirs grid-cell size in degrees when aggregation="grid"; one of 0.005, 0.01, 0.02, 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, or 5. Omit it to choose a size automatically from the region. Values finer than 0.1 read individual detections and return the 500 busiest cells. Not accepted by other datasets or aggregation modes. | |
| start_date | Yes | Inclusive start date in ISO YYYY-MM-DD format. | |
| aggregation | No | Aggregation mode. "monthly" (default) or "daily" returns a time series. Most datasets allow at most 50 intervals per call (~4 years monthly or ~7 weeks daily); fires_viirs allows 200 (~16 years monthly or ~7 months daily). fires_viirs, ndvi_s2, and *_tropomi also accept "grid": one spatial row per lat/lon cell over the whole window, at most 500 rows, with a 92-day maximum window (366 days for fires). fires_viirs also accepts "seasons", which repeats the requested calendar window in every year since 2012 and returns one row per year, and "points", which returns exact detections only when the window contains at most 500; otherwise use grid or narrow the window. | monthly |
| include_flares | No | fires_viirs only. False by default, excluding gas flares, other permanent industrial heat sources, volcanoes, and offshore detections so only vegetation fires are counted. Set true over a gas field or to count every detection NASA publishes. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
No arguments | |||