There are two ways to download image data from Earth Engine–exporting to Drive or downloading from URL. Each has pros and cons, but for quickly pulling data into Python, URL downloading is the only option (just watch out for the pesky 32 Mb file size limit). I built a Python package called wxee a while back that uses the URL download system to turn Earth Engine image collections into xarray datasets, and as part of some much-needed improvements to that package, I decided to take a closer lo...
