As Earth observation archives continue to grow at a blistering pace, it is becoming increasingly desirable not to download and manage files at all. Instead you often want to either 1) open the small pieces of large files directly into our favorite programming environment, or 2) stream large quantities of data on platforms co-located archive for high performance. Fortunately the combination of STAC metadata, cloud-optimized data formats, and open-source software is a powerful system for consistent and efficient access to geographically dispersed Earth Observation archives. In the following short article we’ll illustrate this system in practice and highlight Python libraries sat-search and intake-STAC. (Authors: Scott Henderson (University of Washington eScience Institute), Matt Hanson (Element84, Inc.). Article posted on Medium https://medium.com/pangeo/intake-stac-nasa-4cd78d6246b7)