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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@Joe Kirklin Suro
> But, taking something opaque, like a cloud, and replacing it with something
> else that is supposed to be underneath is not processing, it’s re-creation
> – the replacement information was not there in the original image.
Ok, I thought you were referring to semi-transparent clouds. Looking around totally opaque objects does sound like some kind of deception.
Hmmmm. Inspired by REDD, forest-centered. Far more important would be oceanic information, particularly SST, because that is where our climate comes from. Ocean currents are involved in Arctic warming. The Pacific equatorial currents and the equatorial countercurrent control the El Nino cycle that has strong periodic climate influences. When the El Nino cycle gets interrupted climate changes happen. When the North Atlantic current system was rearranged at the start of the twentieth century the Arctic started to melt. Plus all the so-called “oscillations” that are poorly defined and in need of more data to pin them down. That is where this resource should be used, not on deforestation detection that is motivated by fear that carbon dioxide is warming up the world.
I share your concerns (as a veteran of the Viet Nam War). But, I have no problem with Google making a profit from these efforts, as long as they are creating tools for discovering knowledge and using this knowledge to solve problems. Their business plan makes most of these tools free for individuals, but large enterprises must pay to use them. (CAGW is the wrong problem, of course, but hopefully these tools can be used by other researchers on other, more realistic problems)
The weapons systems used by our armed forces are manufactured, for profit, by large defense contractors. I support that because those profits are used to create jobs and economic growth to employ millions of workers, mostly in technical jobs and for growth and research, which is a kind of “wealth” that makes us stronger and richer.
Am I saying we need wars to prosper? No, just saying that our nation has prospered because the people have been allowed to use their ingenuity to adapt and solve problems, on whatever scale.
The U.S. government, OTOH, has grown enormously and tends to be parasitic, feeding on this wealth by creating a mind-boggling bureaucracy and welfare system, which perhaps sustains us, but does not make us stronger and richer.
The map lover in me is excited. But
Is the code open, unlike Mann-made global modeling?
Who will verify the integrity of the data-set? Or will it be subject to Hansenian manipulation?
Upon closer examination, the datasets appear to be imagery, which are temporarily available (until Feb or so) for viewing the on-line Earth Engine. But the important piece of this, IMHO, access to the Earth Engine API, appears to be restricted.
http://earthengine.googlelabs.com/#intro
So, no access to tons of “raw data” as some had hoped. Those of you who have a serious interest in this should contact the Earth Engine team and request access to the API.
For the rest of us, there’s always OSGeo, free and open to anyone:
http://www.osgeo.org/
Why so many anti Google comments here. They have probably created the greatest range of free to the end user internet products ever. If you don’t like them just ignore them as there is plenty of competition.
Can someone get Google to pick up the Argo data in (near) real time, please?? The data seems a bit hard to get hold of and there is a lack of academic papers presenting the last few years results still.
@peakbear
> Can someone get Google to pick up the Argo data in (near) real time, please??
If you just want to download the data, you can find it here
http://www.argo.net/TXTdata.html
[Found this using Google query argo data download and it came back as the first hit.]
@peakbear
> … If you don’t like them just ignore them as there is plenty of competition.
This is a little O/T, but I occasionally use the DDG (Duck Duck Go) search engine:
http://duckduckgo.com/
DuckDuckGo is a search engine, like Google.
Use DuckDuckGo for:
• More Zero-click Info
→ Useful info above the links.
• More Privacy
→ We do not track you. Google does.
• More Goodies
→ Instant answers, !bangs & settings.
• Less Spam
→ We ban irrelevant sites.
Try it for a week and give us feedback!
→ Click here to try it now.
→ Can your search engine do this?
FAQ | Tools
“Piers Corbyn says:
December 4, 2010 at 2:25 pm”
Piers, keep bringing it on here. Please?