A process of identifying a boundary polygon for working with satellite data over Africa

To run this process you need Python 3 with Shapely and Fiona installed and either wget or to manually download the Natural Earth admin 0 countries dataset.

To run the process with Make, do the following:

• make get-natural-earth (downloads the source data)
• make extract-africa-hull (extracts Africa and creates a buffered convex hull).

And to extract the CSV of MGRS tiles, do:

• make extract-mgrs-codes.

Notes:

• Africa is defined as features that have "REGIONS_UN = Africa" in the NE dataset
• The African areas are unioned, then a convex hull is created
• This resulting convex hull is buffered by 1 degree
• Some areas are excluded, see exclusions.json.

The derived dataset africa-extent.json is derived from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain, see: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/.