Welcome to the DEA Sandbox

The Digital Earth Australia (DEA) Sandbox is an Earth observation learning and analysis environment supporting Australian government and education users to get started with DEA Data Products.

Eligibility

The DEA Sandbox service is available to Australian government and education users who have recognised Australian government or education institute email addresses (.gov.au or .edu.au or equivalent).

Industry who are working directly with Australian government on government-directed outcomes will be able to put forward their use-case application for consideration. In these cases, a government sponsor needs to be provided.

Account sponsorship

All users requesting an account will need to provide the details of a sponsor for the account. The sponsor information is collected to verify identity, and as a secondary point of contact for the account. The sponsor will be asked to acknowledge the DEA Sandbox disclaimer alongside the user.

The sponsor:

• Should be a supervisor or line manager to the account requestor (or at least have familiarity with the role of the account requestor to be able to speak on their behalf).
• Must be a senior executive/SES1 (for government and industry users) or professor, lead lecturer or course convenor (for education users).

For details of the registration process, head to the DEA Knowledge Hub.

Back up regularly: Always back up your Sandbox files to avoid data loss. You can use Git, or right-click a file and select 'Download'.

Clear browser cache: If you experience issues, please empty the cache and hard reload.

Read the guide: How to use the DEA Sandbox

Latest updates, releases, and outages

Geoscience Australia observes an agency-wide shut down between 24 December 2025 and 5 January 2026. Just like previous years, during this time, our products remain active and accessible; however, no active monitoring or user support will be provided during this period. Should any service interruptions occur, they will be addressed as soon as possible once operations resume on 5 January 2026.

New user account creation for the DEA Sandbox will be suspended over the shutdown period. Existing DEA Sandbox users should not be affected.

New user sign-ups will recommence from Monday 12 January 2025.

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By logging in to the DEA Sandbox, you acknowledge that you have read the full Disclaimer. We may collect personal information during the registration process as per our Privacy policy. We may remove accounts that misuse the Sandbox.