NOTE Effective January 31, 2026, ARD will no longer be available as an API programmatic ordering option for imagery through our platform. See the deprecation notice.
Multispectral Image
Overview
An ARD multispectral image is a 4 or 8-band image that has been minimally processed for analytics. The following pre-processing steps are applied:
- Atmospheric compensation
- Orthorectification to native resolution, as captured by the sensor
Multispectral images are saved as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG):
- processed using GDAL's
COGoutput format using default settings DEFLATEcompression- NoData pixels are encoded in a mask band
Example image
This example shows a multispectral image over San Francisco, CA USA.
Bands
4-band multispectral imagery has the following bands:
| band name | common name | description |
|---|---|---|
| BAND_B | blue | Blue |
| BAND_G | green | Green |
| BAND_R | red | Red |
| BAND_IR | nir08 | Near Infrared 1 |
8-band multispectral imagery has the following bands:
| band name | common name | description |
|---|---|---|
| BAND_B | blue | Blue |
| BAND_C | coastal | Coastal blue |
| BAND_G | green | Green |
| BAND_R | red | Red |
| BAND_IR | nir08 | Near Infrared 1 |
| BAND_Y | yellow | Yellow |
| BAND_RE | rededge | Red Edge 1 |
| BAND_N2 | nir09 | Near Infrared 2 |
File information
File type: Raster GeoTIFF
File name: {acquisitionID}-ms.tif
File path: bucket or location/prefix/UTM zone/quadkey/acquisition date/