Data Notification

Replacing AOP Data Viewer with Google Earth Engine Visualization App on the NEON Data Portal

April 15, 2026

NEON’s Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) has ramped up data additions to Google Earth Engine (GEE), with data now available on the Publisher catalog. This catalog provides an additional cloud-based option for NEON data users to discover and work with NEON remote sensing data. As part of this effort, the AOP science team developed a visualization app for viewing and inspecting some of the level 3 (mosaicked) hyperspectral, lidar, and camera data products in GEE.

In light of significant overlap between this app and the Data Portal AOP Data Viewer, NEON is replacing the AOP Data Viewer with the GEE app that enables visualization of many of the same remote sensing datasets that are hosted on Google Earth Engine. This notification explains the key changes and provides an overview of some of the new visualization tools available as part of the new data viewer.

What is new and different with this visualization app?

There are a number of updates and changes you will see when using the GEE-backed app, compared to the previous AOP Data Viewer. Please see the video walk-through of the new app features: Learn How to Use the NEON AOP GEE Data Viewer, and continue reading for more details.

New features:

  • An option to visualize RGB band combinations of the full reflectance data cube (all 426 bands) for both bidirectional (DP3.30006.002) and directional (DP3.30006.001) reflectance (see notes section below for more information). Visualization options include:
    • Customizable band combinations including Natural Color Composite, False Color Composite, and an option for users to select the bands by band number
    • Filtering on cloud-conditions during flight to enable the display of data acquired at <10% cloud cover, <50% cloud cover, or under all cloud conditions
  • New interactive features, including:
    • For each NEON site, ability to compare two different data products and/or acquisition dates
    • An interactive pixel inspector to display spectral plots or query the pixel values in an image
    • Generation of code snippets that can be copied into your GEE Code Editor for additional custom data exploration
    • Ancillary layers that show terrestrial and aquatic sites, tower locations, airsheds, plot boundaries, and background images
    • Option to export the current layer as an RGB geotiff to your local Google Drive; this may be down-sampled to a coarser resolution due to size limitations
    • Information about image(s) acquisition start and end dates, release status, and Digital Object Identifier (DOI, if available - for Released data only)
    • Access to a streamlined, GPS-enabled mobile version of the AOP GEE Data Viewer

Notes about availability and derived datasets:

  • The full archive of directional reflectance has not been added to GEE as of the date of this posting (April 2026); these data additions are expected to be complete by the end of May 2026. There is currently complete availability for directional reflectance data collected between 2019-2021 and earlier years will be filled in over the next months. This applies to the derived indices as well. Note that availability in GEE may not always match availability in the NEON Data Portal.
  • Derived Indices and Derived Data Products (Vegetation Indices, Canopy Water Indices, LAI, fPAR, Surface Albedo, Terrain Products) in the AOP Data Viewer are produced in real-time from Directional Reflectance, Bidirectional Reflectance, or Digital Elevation Models. These derived products do not represent the exact data products (or availability thereof) on the NEON Data Portal. Instead, they are calculated on-the-fly in GEE and so may exhibit subtle differences if directly compared to the corresponding data products on the data portal. The derived products included in the app are intended mainly for visualization purposes, although additional analyses using these indices can be conducted in GEE using the “Sample GEE Script for displaying the 1st Image” function as a starting point. The corresponding data products on the NEON data portal are listed below (along with links to the product pages):

If you have any questions about the new AOP viewer app, please use NEON’s Contact Us Form and include the words “AOP Data Viewer” in the text.

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