Major TOM Core AlphaEarth Embeddings Subset

This is a prototype dataset. It only includes some of the AlphaEarth embeddings stored in Major TOM grid cells.

This dataset is mostly aimed at experimentation and prototyping. It is particularly useful to use it along other datasets published within the Major TOM project.

Content

Example Access

from fsspec.parquet import open_parquet_file
import pyarrow.parquet as pq
import rasterio as rio

# 1. Read the metadata
metadata_url = "https://huggingface.co/datasets/Major-TOM/Core-AlphaEarth-Embeddings/resolve/main/metadata.parquet"
columns = ["grid_cell","subdir"]
row_idx = 0

with open_parquet_file(metadata_url,columns = columns) as f:
    with pq.ParquetFile(f) as pf:
        row_group = pf.read_row_group(row_idx, columns=columns)

subdir = row_group['subdir'][0].as_py()
grid_cell = row_group['grid_cell'][0].as_py()

# 2. Read the data
file_url = f"https://huggingface.co/datasets/Major-TOM/Core-AlphaEarth-Embeddings/resolve/main/{subdir}/{grid_cell}.tif"

with rio.open(f"/vsicurl/{file_url}") as src:
    embedding_array = src.read()

Coverage (zoom in)

This is a sample dataset with 62,489 grid cells covered, each containing 1,068 by 1,068 embeddings, each of dimensionality 64. In total, that covers 71,276,453,136 (71 billion) individual embeddings, with over 7 milion square kilometers covered.

Examples

Data Source

The source data is produced by Google and Google DeepMind.

🗄 Source Dataset: https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/GOOGLE_SATELLITE_EMBEDDING_V1_ANNUAL

📝 Blog post: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaearth-foundations-helps-map-our-planet-in-unprecedented-detail/

📜 Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22291

AlphaEarth Citation:

@misc{brown2025alphaearthfoundationsembeddingfield,
      title={AlphaEarth Foundations: An embedding field model for accurate and efficient global mapping from sparse label data}, 
      author={Christopher F. Brown and Michal R. Kazmierski and Valerie J. Pasquarella and William J. Rucklidge and Masha Samsikova and Chenhui Zhang and Evan Shelhamer and Estefania Lahera and Olivia Wiles and Simon Ilyushchenko and Noel Gorelick and Lihui Lydia Zhang and Sophia Alj and Emily Schechter and Sean Askay and Oliver Guinan and Rebecca Moore and Alexis Boukouvalas and Pushmeet Kohli},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2507.22291},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV}
}

Major TOM Citation:

@inproceedings{Francis2024MajorTOM,
  author={Francis, Alistair and Czerkawski, Mikolaj},
  booktitle={IGARSS 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium}, 
  title={Major TOM: Expandable Datasets for Earth Observation}, 
  year={2024},
  pages={2935-2940},
  doi={10.1109/IGARSS53475.2024.10640760}
}

@misc{Czerkawski2024EmbeddedMajorTOM,
      title={Global and Dense Embeddings of Earth: Major TOM Floating in the Latent Space}, 
      author={Mikolaj Czerkawski and Marcin Kluczek and Jędrzej S. Bojanowski},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2412.05600},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05600}, 
}

Credits

This dataset was curated by Mikolaj Czerkawski (@mikonvergence) from Asterisk Labs.

Thank you to Cesar Aybar (https://github.com/csaybar) and Julio Contreras (https://github.com/JulioContrerasH) for supporting me with the core code used to acquire this dataset at scale.