CataEx: A multi-task export tool for the Google Earth Engine data catalog

Satellite imagery is provided by different missions such as ASTER, MODIS, Sentinel, Landsat, IKONOS, GeoEye, SPOT, WorldView, Ple<acute accent>aides, or RapidEye. One of the major encumbrances is the digital volume that satellite imagery claims during download, storage, and processing. This inconvenience has been overcome since 2010 by the Google Earth Engine, a cloud-based platform for global geospatial analysis dedicated to users who are not necessarily remote sensing specialists. However, compatibility with traditional desktop or web-based GIS software remains tricky as bringing satellite imagery from the Google Earth Engine to another software requires a coded export via JavaScript or Python. We present the multi-functional code tool CataEx in JavaScript to exemplify several essential types of computations (i.e., filtering of image collections, cloud masking, index and histogram generation, and layer creation) before exporting images as GeoTIFFs. CataEx is kept deliberately simple without much "sophisticated" code language to allow JavaScript beginners to get familiar with basic coding concepts and develop their own scripts.