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 datacurrent and historicalonline for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earths environment. The platform will enable scientists to use our extensive computing infrastructurethe Google cloudto analyze this imagery.
Last year, we demonstrated an early prototype. Since then, we have developed the platform, and are excited now to bid scientists around the world access to Earth Engine to implement their applications.
Why is this significant? 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 informationsuch 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 defy 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 bid a complete global archive of Landsat.
- Reduced time to do analyses, using Googles 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 exclude clouds and haze.
- Collaboration and standardization by creating a common platform for global data analysis.
Google Earth Engine can be used for a wide anger of applicationsfrom mapping water resources to ecosystem services to deforestation. Its part of our broader effort at Google to
build a more sustainable future. Were particularly excited about an initial use of Google Earth Engine to support development of systems to monitor, report and authenticate (MRV) efforts to desist 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 desist deforestation.
Over the past two years, weve been working with several top scientists to fully develop this platform and integrate their desktop software to labor online with the data available in Google Earth Engine. Those scientistsGreg Asner of the
Carnegie Institution for Science, Carlos Souza of
Imazon and Matt Hansen of the
Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State Universityare at the cutting edge of forest monitoring in support of climate science.
In collaboration with Matt Hansen and
CONAFOR, Mexicos National Forestry Commission, weve 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 section, including the Yucatan peninsula), produced in collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen and CONAFOR. We hope that Google Earth Engine will be an significant tool to help institutions around the world manipulate forests more wisely. As we fully develop the platform, we hope more scientists will use new Earth Engine API to integrate their applications onlinefor deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response, water resource mapping and other beneficial uses. If youre interested in partnering with us, we want to hear from youvisit our
website! We look forward to seeing whats possible when scientists, governments, NGOs, universities, and others gain access to data and computing resources to collaborate online to help protect the earths environment.
Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth EngineSource