I have a raster, where the value of a pixel should represent the date at which that pixel was deforested. Dates ranging from 2015 until today. I need resolution to be at the level of day. I would like to be able to perform raster maths on pixels (i.e. show all pixels between two dates), so ISO dates are not appropriate.
What format could I use for dates? I am making a code library so I want to use accepted standards where possible.
I am doing raster processing that needs to be fast (Im using Google Earth Engine JS API). So storing the full unix timestamp as pixel values seems to be overkill. But I presume it needs to be an integer.
Is there a best practice approach for this?