Rasterio read function producing uniform array or near-zero values for a non-uniform raster

Question

I have been looking all over the internet for a possible cause of this, but without luck, and was hoping it's some standard Rasterio quirk that I just can't track down. I am trying to load the Tanzania poverty map from World Pop, which is a 1km resolution raster grid of population rates (available here). Values for each grid square can be between 0 and 1, and the raster looks like this:

Using the following Python code I've been loading the raster with Rasterio:

import os
import rasterio

file_path = os.path.abspath('path/to/tza10povcons125.tif')
raster = rasterio.open(file_path)
band = raster.read(1)

Based on my understanding of Rasterio, I would expect the band variable to contain a 2 dimensional array of values between 0 and 1 (or, rather, 0.664994 and 0.950991, which are the min and max values according to QGIS). However, when I print out the band variable I see:

array([[ -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38, ...,
         -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38],
       [ -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38, ...,
         -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38],
       [ -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38, ...,
         -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38],
       ..., 
       [ -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38, ...,
         -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38],
       [ -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38, ...,
         -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38],
       [ -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38, ...,
         -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38,  -3.39999995e+38]], dtype=float32)

The recurring value, -3.39999995e+38, is also suspiciously close to the minimum value for numpy's float32 datatype:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> np.finfo('float32').min
-3.4028235e+38

I am just wondering if anyone has seen this kind of behaviour for Rasterio before, or if there is something obvious that I am missing?

Answer 1

Probably those -3.39999995e+38 are NO_DATA values of the raster. In rasterio you can check which cells have NO_DATA values using a mask.

msk = raster.read_masks(1)

Answer 2

You can use the following to identify a NODATA value:

print(raster.nodata)