Cloud Storage provides a variety of public datasets that can be accessed by the community and integrated into their applications. Google pays for the hosting of these datasets, providing public access to the data via tools such as the Google Cloud console and Google Cloud CLI.
Available public datasets on Cloud Storage
ERA5: Datasets from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) that provide worldwide, hourly estimates of numerous climate variables. Data available from 1940 to May 2023.
Sentinel-2: A satellite image dataset from the European Space Agency (ESA) that includes multispectral images of the Earth's land surface, with a resolution of 10–60 meters per pixel, from 2015 through the present.
NEXRAD: A weather radar dataset collected from a network of 160 high-resolution Doppler weather radars operated by the NOAA National Weather Service (NWS), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the U.S. Air Force (USAF).
Landsat Collection 1 data: A satellite image dataset from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA.
How to use public datasets on Cloud Storage
Cloud Storage is a powerful, simple, and cost effective object storage service. The public datasets are already hosted and available for users to access for free. You can access public data with tools such as the Google Cloud console and Google Cloud CLI, or with a Cloud Storage API link.
The Google Cloud console and gcloud CLI require you to authenticate to access public data. The user account that you authenticate with does not have to be associated with the project that contains the public data, nor does it need to be signed up for the Cloud Storage service.
By contrast, accessing public data with a Cloud Storage API link does not require authentication. This method is suited for general-purpose links to publicly shared data. For example, API links can be used in a web page or downloaded with a command-line tool such as cURL.
To learn more about accessing public datasets, refer to our documentation.
How to list your public dataset on Cloud Storage
If you have any questions about listing a public dataset on Cloud Storage, please contact us at gcp-public-data@google.com.