Hi and welcome back! Until now we have always used datasets offered by the Earth Engine in our examples but it is also possible to upload your own assets and use them as well. So in this example we will see how to do just that, both for raster and vector data.
I assume you already have external data you want to import, either data you created yourself using some GIS software, or data from other sources. If not, there are many platforms offering free satellite data such as “EarthData” by NASA, or “Earth Explorer” by USGS. But do a quick search and you will probably find many more.
When you want to upload a raster to your assets in the Earth Engine it has to be of a GeoTIFF format This is basically a TIFF image with integrated georeferencing information. You can also upload TIFF files together with a TFW file that contains the referencing data. If your raster is not in one of these formats, try exporting, or downloading it again into that format.
But if that is not an option, you can always try converting tools. There is a free online converting tool that works great, but there are limits on the size of files you want to convert. I will add a link to this tool in the description.
Once you have your TIFF file you want to upload, go to the “Assets” tab and click “NEW”. For uploading raster data you choose “image upload” and you can upload the file. It is also possible to add an additional .
TFW file if available. This stores, as mentioned earlier, additional information about pixel size, rotation, world coordinates and so on. If you want you can add additional information about the image and you confirm by pressing OK.
You will see the upload is added to your “Tasks” tab and the asset will be available once uploading is finished I have five raster files with global population data that I want to store in a new Image Collection so I will continue uploading the others. And lets just skip ahead until this is finished So that's done, And now we can find our uploaded images under “Assets” and start working with them. We could import them directly in our script and start working with them as “Image” objects, but since I have five I want to organize them in an Image Collection.
To do this click “NEW”, Image collection, and this will create an empty collection. Then we can open that collection and add images by typing the image ID Or simply by dragging the image into the collection. Now we can also import this collection and start working with it.
Uploading vector data is very similar. In stead of ‘image upload’ you select ‘table upload’ and upload the files. These files have to be uploaded as shapefiles with the extension ‘shp’ and must be uploaded together with ‘dbf’ and ‘shx’ file.
If available you can also add these other files, but only the first three are required. You can also choose to upload a zip file containing these files. And again, if your data is not in this format, you can try a conversion tool.
Then again you click ‘OK’ and when uploading is complete, it will appear in the ‘Assets’ tab where you can use it as an Earth Engine Feature Collection. I have here a shapefile containing all dry regions on earth. And now we can perform calculations with these datasets as with any other dataset.
For example we can calculate how many people on earth live in a dry region for the given years And that’s how you import external data. I hope this was clear, if not, leave it in the comments. The next video will be about exporting data from the Earth Engine to use outside of the browser So I’ll see you then!
