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How To Access Data With Python

The following Python code example demonstrates how to configure a connection to download data from an Earthdata Login enabled server. Note that you will need to a secure way to configure the Earthdata Login username and password.

# Tested on Python 3
#!/usr/bin/python
from http.cookiejar import CookieJar
from urllib import urlencode

import urllib


# The user credentials that will be used to authenticate access to the data

username = "<Your Earthdata login username>"
password = "<Your Earthdata login password>"


# The url of the file we wish to retrieve

url = "https://daacdata.apps.nsidc.org/pub/DATASETS/nsidc0192_seaice_trends_climo_v3/total-ice-area-extent/nasateam/gsfc.nasateam.month.anomaly.area.1978-2021.s"


# Create a password manager to deal with the 401 reponse that is returned from
# Earthdata Login

password_manager = urllib.request.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
password_manager.add_password(None, "https://urs.earthdata.nasa.gov", username, password)


# Create a cookie jar for storing cookies. This is used to store and return
# the session cookie given to use by the data server (otherwise it will just
# keep sending us back to Earthdata Login to authenticate).  Ideally, we
# should use a file based cookie jar to preserve cookies between runs. This
# will make it much more efficient.

cookie_jar = CookieJar()


# Install all the handlers.

opener = urllib.request.build_opener(
    urllib.request..HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager),
    #urllib.request.HTTPHandler(debuglevel=1),    # Uncomment these two lines to see
    #urllib.request.HTTPSHandler(debuglevel=1),   # details of the requests/responses
    urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookie_jar))
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)


# Create and submit the request. There are a wide range of exceptions that
# can be thrown here, including HTTPError and URLError. These should be
# caught and handled.

request = urllib.request.Request(url)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)


# Print out the result (not a good idea with binary data!)

body = response.read()
print(body)

Here is another example that will only work with later versions of python:

#!/usr/bin/python



import requests # get the requsts library from https://github.com/requests/requests



# overriding requests.Session.rebuild_auth to mantain headers when redirected

class SessionWithHeaderRedirection(requests.Session):

    AUTH_HOST = 'urs.earthdata.nasa.gov'

    def __init__(self, username, password):

        super().__init__()

        self.auth = (username, password)



   # Overrides from the library to keep headers when redirected to or from

   # the NASA auth host.

    def rebuild_auth(self, prepared_request, response):

        headers = prepared_request.headers

        url = prepared_request.url



        if 'Authorization' in headers:

            original_parsed = requests.utils.urlparse(response.request.url)

            redirect_parsed = requests.utils.urlparse(url)



            if (original_parsed.hostname != redirect_parsed.hostname) and \

                    redirect_parsed.hostname != self.AUTH_HOST and \

                    original_parsed.hostname != self.AUTH_HOST:

                del headers['Authorization']



        return



# create session with the user credentials that will be used to authenticate access to the data

username = "USERNAME"

password= "PASSWORD"

session = SessionWithHeaderRedirection(username, password)



# the url of the file we wish to retrieve

url = "https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/MOST/MOD10A1.006/2016.12.31/MOD10A1.A2016366.h14v03.006.2017002110336.hdf.xml"



# extract the filename from the url to be used when saving the file

filename = url[url.rfind('/')+1:]  



try:

    # submit the request using the session

    response = session.get(url, stream=True)

    print(response.status_code)



    # raise an exception in case of http errors

    response.raise_for_status()  



    # save the file

    with open(filename, 'wb') as fd:

        for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=1024*1024):

            fd.write(chunk)



except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as e:

    # handle any errors here

    print(e)

Here is another simple example:

# assuming variables `username`, `password` and `url` are set...

    # Example URL

    url = "https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/MOST/MOD10A1.006/2016.12.31/"

    # url = "https://e4ftl01.cr.usgs.gov/MOTA/MCD43A2.006/2017.09.04/"

    import requests

    with requests.Session() as session:

            session.auth = (username, password)

            r1 = session.request('get', url)

            r = session.get(r1.url, auth=(username, password))

            if r.ok:

                print(r.content)# Say

Accessing Data from NSIDC:

NSIDC has provided sample scripts to access their data with Python:

NSIDC_SingleDL.py

NSIDC_Parse_HTML_BatchDL.py