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.

Panchromatic Image

Overview

An ARD panchromatic image is a single-band black and white 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

Panchromatic images are saved as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG):

• processed using GDAL's COG output format using default settings
• DEFLATE compression
• NoData pixels are encoded in a mask band

Example image

This is an example of a panchromatic ARD image over San Francisco, CA USA.

Bands

Panchromatic (black and white) imagery has a single band:

band name	description
BAND_P	pan

File information

File type: Raster GeoTIFF

File name: {acquisitionID}-pan.tif

File path: bucket or location/prefix/UTM zone/quadkey/acquisition date/