Add earthaccess as a dependency for CMR search functionality?

[scottyhq]

Attempting to consolidate some discussion from UW Hackweek, Slack, etc. There is a general interest in ensuring various Python tools are working well together and not duplicating code and effort! One opportunity for this is to consolidate CMR search functionality:

• https://github.com/nsidc/earthaccess is emerging as the leading client library for authentication, search, and optionally download/stream data from CMR. As a dependency it in turn uses python-cmr, although there is discussion here about the merits of alternatively using CMR-STAC Align earthaccess with STAC nsidc/earthaccess#221.

• sliderule-python has kept around some client-side code for querying CMR https://slideruleearth.io/rtd/api_reference/earthdata.html and separately uses server-side code to interact with CMR. Instead of custom code, earthaccess could be used for search, and possibly there are some advanced optimizations that could be upstreamed to earthaccess.

• There is a bit of a challenge right now in getting footprint polygons right now from earthaccess. If using CMR-STAC this is easy but maybe slow compared to custom parsing polygons from the default CMR JSON returns. I worked a bit during the hackweek on making this easier via earthaccess (see Add method to convert results enabling GeoDataFrame.explore() to be used for creation of interactive maps nsidc/earthaccess#305) @dshean could you provide a short code example for search -> geodataframe to ensure performance is the same if changing code in sliderule?

cc @jpswinski @JessicaS11 @tsutterley

[dshean]

Really appreciate you summarizing all of this @scottyhq!
Here is gist with sample code, observed runtimes, and region geojson: https://gist.github.com/dshean/b8f1c73dcf83938258363e722648da29
Let me know if anything else would be useful here. Would be great to see some of this functionality upstream in earthaccess!