EarthEngine_authentication_guide.md

EarthEngine Authentication Guide

Aug.25, 2022 Chris Harding (charding@iastate.edu)

This guide is meant for TouchTerrain users who want to:

1. Run the standalone version of TouchTerrain in a colab or binder jupyter notebook and
2. Use it with online elevation data (via Google Earth Engine) instead of only with local geotiff files

Rationale

• Using the colab badge or the binder badge will eventually show you a notebook (TouchTerrain_jupyter_starters_binder.ipynb) inside a browser.
• When running the cell ee.Authenticate() in this notebook, you will be required to generate and paste in a token (code) that connects your notebook code with a EarthEngine dev account

Request a EarthEngine dev account (I'm actually not sure if this is required, so you could skip this part and see if the rest works!)

• This assumes that you have a standard Google account and are signed in with it on your current browser
• In your browser, go to go to https://signup.earthengine.google.com/ and request an account
• Use something like Want to use TouchTerrain to create 3D printable terrain models files as reason
• I think this will only work for private and research usage, so use this for Organization/Institution
• You should get an email with sign-up instructions (need more detail for this part, which I cannot do myself!)

Generating the token

• Running ee.Authenticate() will output a URL (starting with https://code.earthengine.google.com/), click on it

• You should see the Google Earth Engine Notebook Authenticator page:

• Select Read-only and click on Choose Project

• Click on Create new Cloud project and fill in the id (which has to be unique!) and name fields, then click Select

• Back on the Notebook Authenticator page you should now see the newly created project as Cloud project

• Click on Generate Token below it.

• Choose a Google account (this should be the same that you are already logged in with)

• Go through this warning (Click Continue)

• Then grant your Earth Engine Notebook access (check both EarthEngine and Cloudstorage)

• Finally, get your token (will be in the orange box in this image). Click on the icon to the right of it to copy it.

• Return to your notebook, paste (Control-V) your token into the entry box and hit Enter/Return(!)

• You should see: Successfully saved authorization token.

• You can now use EarthEngine data to generate 3D terrain models! Continue with the next cell in the notebook.