In Earth Engine, when exporting to drive the raster is shifted

Question

The Problem:

Two identical Landsat scenes were downloaded from two different sources. USGS Earth Explorer and Google Earth Engine. Although both of the scenes are in the exact same coordinate system (EPSG:32638), their pixels do not align correctly. They are shifted 15 meters both horizontally and vertically as shown Below:

I believe that the USGS raster is the correct one, while GEE one has some issues when exporting it.

Data:

To generate the GEE raster please see the following GEE code:

var image = ee.Image('LANDSAT/LC08/C02/T1_L2/LC08_168037_20210918').select('SR_B2')
Map.centerObject(image,8);
Map.addLayer(image , null,'Band 2');

Export.image.toDrive({
    image: image,
    description: 'testImage',
    fileNamePrefix: 'testImage',
    scale: 30,
    // region: aoi,
    maxPixels: 1e10,
    crs:'EPSG:32638',
    folder: 'Image Production'
    })

• USGS raster can be downloaded here
• GEE raster can be downloaded here

Non-Working solutions:

• I've tried the solution in Align images with self-defined CRS in Google Earth Engine and this post, but none of them worked.
• I've also tried to use a custom projection (wkt) but didn't succeed.

My request:

• To be able to export Landsat8 rasters perfectly aligned with their corresponding ones in USGS Earth explorer.
• To be able to export Sentinel2 rasters perfectly aligned with their corresponding ones in Scihub.

Answer 1

If you additionally pass in the crs transform to the export call and remove the scale parameter everything should line up perfectly. You can access the transform like this: image.projection().getInfo().transform.

Then you can export like this:

Export.image.toDrive({
    image: image,
    description: 'testImage',
    fileNamePrefix: 'testImage',
    // region: aoi,
    maxPixels: 1e10,
    crs:'EPSG:32638',
    crsTransform: image.projection().getInfo().transform,
    folder: 'Image Production'
})

Answer 2

After hours of work and a fruitful discussion with JonasV, I came up with a solution.
We simply need to shift back the image by modifying the factors in crsTransform as shown below:

var aoi = /* color: #0b4a8b */ee.Geometry.Polygon(
    [[[44.1374165309615, 32.51214068906346],
      [44.000087429399, 32.20124427322498],
      [44.7636372340865, 32.06169106082084],
      [45.087733913774, 32.19659594016746],
      [45.153651882524, 32.30809035172925],
      [44.4230610622115, 32.52140473578572],
      [44.373622585649, 32.627872600190045]]]);

var image1 = ee.Image('LANDSAT/LC08/C02/T1_L2/LC08_168037_20210918').select('SR_B2')
var image2 = ee.Image('LANDSAT/LC08/C02/T1_L2/LC08_168038_20210918').select('SR_B2')
var mosaic = ee.ImageCollection.fromImages([image2,image1]).mosaic()
var final = mosaic.clip(aoi)
var crst = [30,0,15,0,-30,-15]

Export.image.toDrive({
    image: final,
    description: 'testImage',
    fileNamePrefix: 'testImage',
    // scale: 30, // No need
    // region: aoi, // No need
    maxPixels: 1e10,
    crs:'EPSG:32638',
    crsTransform: crst,
    folder: 'Image Production'
    })

Note that in crst variable there is a 15 which tells GEE to shift the raster to the east 15 meters and -15 which tells GEE to shift the raster to the south 15 meters in order to compensate the offset in the new processed image. For Sentinel 2, I believe the crst should be [10,0,5,0,-10,-5] for bands with 10m resolution.