Platform for analyzing geospatial data and satellite imagery at petabyte scale.
What is Google Earth Engine?
Google Earth Engine is one of the most comprehensive platforms for geospatial data analysis. The service combines a catalog of over 80 petabytes of satellite imagery and geospatial data with a powerful analysis engine running in Google’s cloud infrastructure. Analyses that would take weeks on local hardware are completed in Earth Engine within minutes.
The data catalog contains satellite imagery from Landsat (historical imagery since the 1970s), Sentinel (ESA), MODIS, Copernicus, and many other sources. Additionally, weather, climate, terrain, land use, and demographic datasets are available. New data is continuously added and automatically processed.
Earth Engine was originally developed for research and is free for academic and non-commercial use. Since its integration into Google Cloud, the platform is also available to commercial users who want to integrate geospatial analysis into their business processes.
Core Features
- Data Catalog: Over 80 petabytes of satellite imagery, climate data, and geospatial data spanning over 50 years
- Analysis Engine: Serverless geospatial processing at petabyte scale in Google’s infrastructure
- Code Editor: Web-based IDE for JavaScript with instant visualization on the map
- Python API: Integration with the data science ecosystem for advanced analyses
Typical Use Cases
Environmental Monitoring and Climate Research
Researchers and environmental organizations analyze changes in forests, glaciers, coastlines, and land surfaces over decades. Earth Engine enables processing thousands of satellite images for time series analyses that visualize climate change impacts.
Agriculture and Precision Farming
Agritech companies use Earth Engine for vegetation indices, soil moisture analyses, and crop yield predictions. The temporal resolution of satellite imagery enables monitoring plant growth throughout the entire growing season.
Benefits
- Access to over 80 petabytes of geospatial data without own data storage
- Serverless cloud-scale analysis without infrastructure management
- Free for research and academic use
- Over 50 years of historical satellite imagery for time series analyses
Integration with innFactory
As a Google Cloud partner, innFactory supports you with Google Earth Engine: integrating geospatial analyses into business applications, developing custom analysis pipelines, and connecting to existing data infrastructure.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Google Earth Engine?
Google Earth Engine is a platform for analyzing geospatial data at petabyte scale. It combines a catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial data with a powerful analysis engine that runs directly in Google's cloud infrastructure.
What data is available?
Earth Engine contains over 80 petabytes of geospatial data, including satellite imagery from Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS, and other sources. The catalog spans historical data from over 50 years and is continuously updated with new imagery.
Which programming languages are supported?
Earth Engine supports JavaScript (in the Code Editor) and Python (via the Earth Engine Python API). The Python API integrates with common data science tools like Pandas, NumPy, and Jupyter Notebooks.
