Analysis-Ready PlanetScope

About Analysis-Ready PlanetScope¶

This product includes derived imagery from PlanetScope sensors.

Analysis-Ready PlanetScope combines data from the three available PlanetScope sensors (Dove Classic, Dove-R, and SuperDove) while enhancing temporal and spatial consistency with trusted, third-party data sources (Landsat, Sentinel-2, MODIS, VIIRS). This is accomplished with a proprietary algorithm that creates pre-processed, harmonized, and spatially consistent near-daily stacks of images that enable time-series analysis and machine learning applications. It delivers four surface reflectance bands: blue, green, red, and near-infrared.

The earliest Analysis-Ready PlanetScope imagery is available on January 01, 2018. The product is produced on-demand when a subscription is initiated.

Products overview¶

Planet offers Analysis-Ready PlanetScope (ARPS) imagery as a 3 meter orthorectified (corrected for terrain distortions) surface reflectance product (ARP-SR). The data is stored in 16-bit integer format (with a multiplication factor of 10,000) as cloud optimized geotiffs compressed using LZW compression. During processing and harmonization, 4-band PS TOA Reflectance (PS-TOAR) (converted from the radiances) are transformed into surface reflectances ensuring radiometric consistency with FORCE-processed Sentinel-2 and Landsat. As a result the spectral bands and spectral response functions of ARPS data will be equivalent to the blue (B2), green (B3), red (B4), and narrow NIR (B8a) bands of Sentinel-2 (ESA 2024). The surface reflectance data represent Normalized BRDF Adjusted Reflectances (NBAR) as the Landsat 8/9 and Sentinel-2 data used for cross-calibration have been normalized to nadir view. Enhanced geometric performance includes temporal positional accuracy of <4m RMSE PCTL90.

The surface reflectance product is accompanied by a Quality Assurance product (ARP-QA) in GeoTIFF format. The QA product is a 2 layer thematic raster using the same spatial grid as the corresponding Analysis-Ready PlanetScope spectral data. Layer 1, Cloud and shadow mask, contains information denoting usable data using seven classifications that allow users to remove pixels that aren’t useful after they download the image. Layer 2, Pixel provenance has integers which can be mapped to PlanetScope scene IDs using the information in the QA raster's metadata header.

All products are delivered with a SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) file that conforms to the STAC specifications. This STAC item contains information that summarizes the properties of the SR and QA products. This includes the version of ARPS that the products were generated with, the dates that the products were created, and support for several STAC extensions, including: Electro-Optical (specification of the spectral bands contained with the SR product and descriptions of the information bands contained within the QA product), Projection (coordinates representing the bounding geometry of the data’s footprint), and Raster (properties of the tile pixels). Analysis-Ready PlanetScope products are generated as regularly gridded raster tiles. Tiles have a 3 meter pixel size, a 24 by 24 km extent (8000 pixel width and height), and are projected in the UTM zone intersected by their extent using the WGS-84 horizontal datum.