Band Subsetting Before Downloading

[mjami00]

Earthaccess download and open functions include all the bands/files as a whole and does not allow users to choose only one band. For example, for HLS, the earthaccess returns all the 18 bands (B01, B02,...), and the download function downloads all the bands. The new feature would allow users to download and open a subset of those files.

New Features:

• Add a parameter to search_data function allowing the user passing band or asset list, so the returned list of DataGranule only includes the subset of data selected by user instead of all the files associated to each granule.
• Define a new function that operates on the list of DataGranule to subset the bands after a search.

Challenge:
Define a solution for listing the available bands for each collection.
possible solutions:
- Define a dictionary
- Use STAC (CMR-STAC) catalog results

[mjami00]

This might be a suitable topic to work on during the December 15, 2025 hackathon.

[Rapsodia86]

There has been a discussion about this: #428

[asteiker]

Thank you for posting this feature idea @mjami00 ! I added the impact: stac label given that this may be a use case for our broader STAC integration goal as you suggested.

Are you envisioning this band subsetting workflow to include a backend subsetter to process and return only the user-requested bands, or to stream only the bands of interest via a Range Get request?

For the former workflow, this may also be relevant to #328