Reading and writing raster data with Rasterio

After covering how to read and write various vector data formats in Python, we'll now do the same for raster data. We'll start with the Rasterio library and have a look at how we can read and write raster data. Open up a new Jupyter Notebook where you have access to the Rasterio library and type the following code:

In: import rasterio    
    dataset = rasterio.open(r"C:\data\gdal\NE\50m_raster\NE1_50M_SR_W
    \NE1_50M_SR_W.tif")

This imports the rasterio library and opens a GeoTIFF file. We can now perform some simple data description commands, such as printing the number of image bands.

Note

Raster images contain either a single or multiple bands. All bands are contained in a single file, with each band covering the same area. When the image is read by your computer, these bands are overlayed on top of each other so that you'll see one single image. Each band contains a 2D array with rows and columns of data. Each data cell of each array contains...