Summary
Google Earth Engine is a platform designed to enable petabyte-scale scientific analysis and visualization of geospatial datasets. Earth Engine provides a consolidated environment including a massive data catalog co-located with thousands of computers for analysis. This talk will discuss products that Earth Engine has produced, and how to access Earth Engine via its Python API.
Description
Background
- What is Earth Engine at a high level?
- Why did the Earth Engine (EE) project start? To monitor global deforestation.
- What architecture design decisions were made, and why?
- Just-in-time computation model
- Lazy evaluation for real-time feedback
The Earth Engine Python API
- PyPI package: earthengine-api
- OAuth authentication
- Using IPython Notebooks for algorithm development
- Special display methods for interactive maps
Philosophical goals and how they are manifested
- Organize the world's (geospatial) information and make it universally accessible and useful
- Facilitate open transparent science
- Speed up science by reducing the effort required to test hypotheses
- Enable collaborative algorithm development
Selected Results
- Consumer-grade visualizations
- Time-lapse global scale interactive video - blog post, interactive viewer (centered on Austin)
- Science-grade Data Products
- High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change - Science journal publication, blog post, interactive viewer
The Future
- Global-scale analysis challenges
- An invitation for developers