It appears to be designed to do photo trend analysis of landsat and other satellite imagery. From the Google Earth Engine page:
A planetary-scale platform for environmental data & analysis
Google Earth Engine brings together the world’s satellite imagery—trillions of scientific measurements dating back more than 25 years—and makes it available online with tools for scientists, independent researchers, and nations to mine this massive warehouse of data to detect changes, map trends and quantify differences to the earth’s surface.
Introducing Google Earth Engine 12/02/2010 08:55:00 AM
Today, we launched a new Google Labs product called Google Earth Engine at the International Climate Change Conference in sunny Cancun, Mexico. Google Earth Engine is a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data—current and historical—online for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment. The platform will enable scientists to use our extensive computing infrastructure—the Google “cloud”—to analyze this imagery. Last year, we demonstrated an early prototype. Since then, we have developed the platform, and are excited now to offer scientists around the world access to Earth Engine to implement their applications.
Why is this important? The images of our planet from space contain a wealth of information, ready to be extracted and applied to many societal challenges. Scientific analysis can transform these images from a mere set of pixels into useful information—such as the locations and extent of global forests, detecting how our forests are changing over time, directing resources for disaster response or water resource mapping.
The challenge has been to cope with the massive scale of satellite imagery archives, and the computational resources required for their analysis. As a result, many of these images have never been seen, much less analyzed. Now, scientists will be able to build applications to mine this treasure trove of data on Google Earth Engine, providing several advantages:
- Landsat satellite data archives over the last 25 years for most of the developing world available online, ready to be used together with other datasets including MODIS. And we will soon offer a complete global archive of Landsat.
- Reduced time to do analyses, using Google’s computing infrastructure. By running analyses across thousands of computers, for example, unthinkable tasks are now possible for the first time.
- New features that will make analysis easier, such as tools that pre-process the images to remove clouds and haze.
- Collaboration and standardization by creating a common platform for global data analysis.
Google Earth Engine can be used for a wide range of applications—from mapping water resources to ecosystem services to deforestation. It’s part of our broader effort at Google to build a more sustainable future. We’re particularly excited about an initial use of Google Earth Engine to support development of systems to monitor, report and verify (MRV) efforts to stop global deforestation.
Deforestation releases a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere, accounting for 12-18% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The world loses 32 million acres of tropical forests every year, an area the size of Greece. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to tropical nations to protect their forests. Reaching an agreement on early development of REDD is a key agenda item here in Cancun.
Today, we announced that we are donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities. We believe Google Earth Engine will bring transparency and more certainty to global efforts to stop deforestation.
Over the past two years, we’ve been working with several top scientists to fully develop this platform and integrate their desktop software to work online with the data available in Google Earth Engine. Those scientists—Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Carlos Souza of Imazon and Matt Hansen of the Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University—are at the cutting edge of forest monitoring in support of climate science.
In collaboration with Matt Hansen and CONAFOR, Mexico’s National Forestry Commission, we’ve produced a forest cover and water map of Mexico. This is the finest-scale forest map produced of Mexico to date. The map required 15,000 hours of computation, but was completed in less than a day on Google Earth Engine, using 1,000 computers over more than 53,000 Landsat scenes (1984-2010). CONAFOR provided National Forest Inventory ground-sampled data to calibrate and validate the algorithm.
A forest cover and water map of Mexico (southern portion, including the Yucatan peninsula), produced in collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen and CONAFOR.
We hope that Google Earth Engine will be an important tool to help institutions around the world manage forests more wisely. As we fully develop the platform, we hope more scientists will use new Earth Engine API to integrate their applications online—for deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response, water resource mapping and other beneficial uses. If you’re interested in partnering with us, we want to hear from you—visit our website! We look forward to seeing what’s possible when scientists, governments, NGO’s, universities, and others gain access to data and computing resources to collaborate online to help protect the earth’s environment.
Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth Engine
h/t to WUWT reader John Day
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Given the Google penchant for making money by any means this sounds like a good way to reinforce the alarmist message that this planet would be better if we left it.
The idea that any planet should hit a phase in development and stop is stupid. Not only do climates change but the earth’s surface changes all the time. Tides and currents move sediment about, sea levels rise and fall, animal species fail and new ones become viable. It is all part of the natural pattern and we are part of that pattern not some element that should not be there.
Expect more alarmist rubbish from Google building in what they have already pushed out.
Ride shotgun on this magnificent venture into new knowledge, Anthony and all who comment here. It must not be corrupted by vested interests, and I have the conviction that you are the people with the power, knowledge, wisdom and commitment to repel any who would attempt to derail this gift from Google to all peoples of the World at large.
Please embrace this charge.
That’s great, Google. BTW, the large construction site you show in Google maps here in the city center of Braunschweig has developed into a mall that i’ve been using over the last 3 years quite extensively. You should take a look, Google. If you ever happen to visit this place again. With your cloud and all. And can i have a “Larry and Sergey Private Plane Tracker” mode with Google Earth. Thanks. For a more sustainable future.
Daniel Ortega used Google´s maps to justify a claim to land long considered Costa Rican territory.1,2 Google´s new gift will be used as seen fit by the user. Do look that gift horse in the mouth.
1. http://www.nacion.com/2010-11-13/ElPais/NotasSecundarias/ElPais2588954.aspx
2. http://www.nacion.com/2010-12-03/ElPais/UltimaHora/ElPais2611405.aspx
Roger Carr says:
December 4, 2010 at 1:25 am
Such naivety imperils us all.
Will this have access to all the data that Mann et al used to get all them bankrolled or just the “modified” stuff.
James.
Roger Carr says:
December 4, 2010 at 1:25 am
We have the knowledge, wisdom and commitment at least.
“….in collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen……”
Any relation?
Was reading this full of excitement and all until I came to this sentence…
REDD is how WWF et al will make tens of billions and more. I wonder how much Google will make out of it?
Roger Carr says:
December 4, 2010 at 1:25 am
See
Will says:
December 4, 2010 at 2:25 am
Interesting. I would like to play with this a little before passing judgement, but I think this could be very useful. I have some interesting concepts that I would like to prove out, but data collection is a nightmare. It is possible that this would help.
Control of data is the one thing that warmists often have on their side. Consider the difficulty that McIntyre had getting data from Jones and Mann. Freeing the data is the worst possible outcome for warmists, because anything that Mann hasn’t touched can be used to show that warming is insignificant. Only Mann strips the data so badly that it no longer has value.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic
Sounds like a useful goodie.
It’s easy to take a jaded view of Google Earth, because this Earth Engine will undoubtedly be used to publicize AGW themes.
Yes, Google unveiled this tool at Cancun and are forming partnerships with the AGW community on projects such as “carbon trading” (good luck with that) and forestry monitoring (I’m no ‘tree hugger’, but I think this is a good environmental application)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B13RK20101202
“Google also wants to eventually sell access to advanced aspects of the tool to carbon traders, policy makers, and researchers working in forestry.”
But don’t overlook that GE is a “public”, open tool, which can be extended by anyone to create new overlays and layers using the Keyhole Markup Language (KML). It’s not just for scientists. Anyone with moderate software skills can geocode their own data (business, politics, religion, anything under the sun) and fuse it with Google Earth. (… or pay someone to do the geocoding)
These user-developed overlays and layers can be distributed and used by anyone who has Google Earth installed on their computer, a free download.
So I think these geospatial tools could have equal value for the skeptic community, for examining, explaining and demonstrating some of the proofs and disproofs of climate hypotheses, and putting it in the context of the Earth in a computerized, “user friendly” way. Especially effective IMHO for folks with software development skills, like Steve McIntyre.
Google Earth an “idea fusion” engine, empowered by the Internet.
[My first H/T from Andrew, I’m honored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_tip%5D
Earth Engine? Sounds like a green mean brainwashing machine to me.
The ultimate WWF Propaganda tool.
No thank you.
I see that the LANDOWNER is NOT among those who can acces the info…seems its govt ngo and anyone else with the bucks to pay??? unis business etc
My reading of the somewhat breathless press release from Google stumbled at the same point as Baa Humbug’s. Redd is proving to be distrous for indigenous tropical forests and is feeding millions of $$ to WWF and other so-called environmental groups. I have to admit that this new Google product has me somewhere between alarmed and excited – it will need a very close and careful watch indeed. Living in the UK, which is now the land of the CCTV surveillance camera, I realise now what a wonderful tool photographic imaging is to assist a police state do its enforcing; The UK has more of these things per acre than any other nation/society and all they seem to be good for is to enable the surveillance of the law-abiding citizenry as the more intelligent of the criminal classes seem to be up to speed with a range of techniques to avoid definitive imaging. And I say this as a civillian formally involved with neighbourhood policing.
Even though most of us make extensive of Google services, its owners/managers are committed one-worlder-Obamaites with little love for America, opportunity for all, or development for the future unless it is for their own elite pocketbooks and freedom to spew carbon as they travel the globe.
Allow me to not give a flying duck about deforestation and co2. Google is NSA is global government mafia.
I went to load google earth onto my mac the other day and before doing so, I found out that google earth loads a program onto your machine that constantly checks for updates and automatically loads them without your knowledge. Given Google’s track record with privacy, I didn’t load it. And I won’t ever load it until they remove this feature. I don’t trust that company.
15,000 hours of detailed analysis in a day. Collaboration. Unparalleled access. REDD. It’s worse than I thought.
…..”New features that will make analysis easier, such as tools that pre-process the images to remove clouds and haze.”
Here we go again with let us “massage” the data for you. “Pre-process” is not correct. The correct term is re-create. And we all know what happens when you do that….
You cannot remove a cloud to show what is under it unless you replace it with something else that did not exist in the original image – period. At that point the image becomes fictional.
Baa Humbug, you are probably right about REDD being a funnel of money to WWF (not wrestling, that would at least be entertaining). My thought was that REDD would fund various third world thugs’ Swiss bank accounts by raising my electric rates or adding to our national debt.
Does anyone recall how Google search engine from one day to the next suddenly could not find “climategate”? From millions to suddenly no hits – like Pravda they simply “disappeared” a term which they found inconvenient or disagreeable.
Are you aware that when you search for something in Google you will see first websites that have paid to be at the top (rather than the most popular sites)
Just remember Google has no integrity. They are out to make money and they will not let the truth stand in the way.
REDD is just one more CAGW-inspired transfer-of-wealth scheme, ripe for abuse, with little or no environmental benefit. The irony is that much of the deforestation taking place is done in the name of producing biofuels, especially ethanol.
It’s almost certainly worse than we think. Can someone still pull the plug in case google’s computer comes alive and wants to take over?
@Jose Suro
> You cannot remove a cloud to show what is under it unless you replace it
> with something else that did not exist in the original image – period.
> At that point the image becomes fictional.
Then you wouldn’t allow doctors to process medical imagery to enhance the resolution of tumors or other pathology? Then a lot of diseases would go undiagnosed.
Yes, it’s yet another kind of “modeling” (groan), but very principled and easily validated with nature. It involves understanding the processes that blur and distort images and performing the inverse convolution (deconvolution). Or making simple assumptions about the distribution of hidden Markovian features and using random fields theory to infer the hidden pieces.
See for yourself. Look at the “before” and “after” results of image processing on page 6: http://www.ensta.fr/~bazeille/fr/CMM06.pdf