The National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) acquires aerial imagery during the agricultural growing seasons in the continental U.S. This “leaf-on” imagery is approximately 1 meter in resolution and is available on Amazon S3 as 4-band RGB + NIR GeoTIFFs and RGB JPEGs. NAIP data is delivered at the state level and every year a number of states receive updates with an overall update cycle of three years.
NAIP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) through the Aerial Photography Field Office (APFO) in Salt Lake City.
Data is available ranging from 2012 to 2015, with some states having 3 years of data.
RGB overview JPEGs are still being generated for full catalog and will be finished in the near future.
The NAIP imagery on AWS is located in the “aws-naip” S3 bucket. The data is in a Requester Pays bucket which means that you can access it freely within the us-east-1 region, but you will incur charges if you download it elsewhere.
The files are provided as digital ortho quarter quad tiles (DOQQs). Each individual tile covers a 3.75 x 3.75 minute quarter quadrangle plus a 300 meter buffer on all four sides. The DOQQs are provided as GeoTIFFs, and each tile area corresponds to a USGS topographic quadrangle. All individual DOQQs are rectified in the UTM coordinate system, NAD 83. Some states, due to their size, use more than one UTM zone. As an example, Texas includes over 17,000 RGBIR files (over 3TB of 4-band imagery) for one of its acquisition years.
Data is grouped by state, year, resolution, data type and quadrangle. The original, uncompressed, GeoTIFF imagery is stored under the /rgbir/ prefix.
For example, al/2015/1m/rgbir/30085/m_3008501_ne_16_1_20151014.tif is a GeoTIFF quarter-quad in the state of Alabama, taken during the 2015 season, at 1m resolution, and is the northeastern corner of the 30085 USGS quadrangle.
The corresponding FGDC metadata file for the above GeoTIFF is located under the /fgdc/ prefix, al/2015/1m/fgdc/30085/m_3008501_ne_16_1_20151014.txt.
Data stored under the prefix /shpfl/ are shapefiles that contain the GeoTIFF file extents of each GeoTIFF.
Additionally, under the /rgb/ prefix is a collection of internally tiled and lightly compressed RGB imagery for use when not all 4 bands are needed. This data is useful as source for background imagery or to use to download a subsampled version of the original. This is additional data not provided by the APFO, but was created using gdal_translate with the following command:
gdal_translate -b 1 -b 2 -b 3 -of GTiff -outsize 50% 50% -co tiled=yes -co BLOCKXSIZE=512 -co BLOCKYSIZE=512 -co COMPRESS=JPEG -co JPEG_QUALITY=85 -co PHOTOMETRIC=YCBCR src_dataset dst_dataset
To see the full list of available files, you can access the bucket manifest with the aws-cli command below:
aws s3api get-object --bucket aws-naip --key manifest.txt --request-payer requester manifest.txt
The aws-naip S3 bucket is provided as a Requester Pays bucket, see here for more information.