ee.Date.difference

  • The Date.difference method calculates the difference between two dates.

  • The difference is returned as a floating-point number based on the average length of the specified unit.

  • The unit for the difference can be 'year', 'month', 'week', 'day', 'hour', 'minute', or 'second'.

 Returns the difference between two Dates in the specified units; the result is floating-point and based on the average length of the unit.

UsageReturns
Date.difference(start, unit)Float
ArgumentTypeDetails
this: dateDate
startDate
unitStringOne of 'year', 'month', 'week', 'day', 'hour', 'minute', or 'second'.

Examples

Code Editor (JavaScript)

// Demonstrates the ee.Date.difference method.

var DATE_1 = ee.Date('2020-01-01');
var DATE_2 = ee.Date('2020-01-15');

var diff_1 = DATE_2.difference(DATE_1, 'days');
var diff_2 = DATE_1.difference(DATE_2, 'weeks');

print('The difference between ',
      DATE_2,
      ' relative to ',
      DATE_1,
      ' is ',
      diff_1,
      ' days.');

print('The difference between ',
      DATE_1,
      ' relative to ',
      DATE_2,
      ' is ',
      diff_2,
      ' weeks.');

Python setup

See the Python Environment page for information on the Python API and using geemap for interactive development.

import ee
import geemap.core as geemap

Colab (Python)

DATE_1 = ee.Date('2020-01-01')
DATE_2 = ee.Date('2020-01-15')

# Format the dates as strings.
t1 = DATE_1.format('YYYY-MM-DD').getInfo()
t2 = DATE_2.format('YYYY-MM-DD').getInfo()

# Calculate the differences between dates.
diff_1 = DATE_2.difference(DATE_1, 'days').getInfo()
diff_2 = DATE_1.difference(DATE_2, 'weeks').getInfo()

print(f'The difference between {t2} relative to {t1} is {diff_1} days.')
print(f'The difference between {t1} relative to {t2} is {diff_2} weeks.')