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 public, free-to-use satellite imagery and geospatial data at petabyte scale with a powerful analysis engine that runs in Google’s cloud infrastructure. Analyses that would take weeks on local hardware can be significantly accelerated in Earth Engine.
The data catalog includes satellite imagery from sources such as Landsat, Sentinel (ESA), and MODIS and Copernicus, as well as weather, climate, terrain, land use, and demographic datasets. New data is continuously added and automatically processed.
Earth Engine was originally developed for research and remains free for academic and noncommercial use, subject to quotas on shared compute resources. As a Google Cloud product, the platform is also available to commercial users who want to integrate geospatial analysis into their business processes.
Core Features
- Data Catalog: Petabyte-scale collection of public satellite imagery, climate data, and other geospatial datasets, some with long historical time series
- Analysis Engine: Large-scale geospatial processing in Google’s cloud infrastructure
- Code Editor: Web-based IDE for JavaScript with instant visualization on the map
- Python API and REST 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 long time periods. Earth Engine enables processing large volumes of satellite imagery 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 an extensive geospatial data catalog without maintaining your own data storage
- Cloud-scale analysis without managing your own infrastructure
- Free for research and academic use
- Long historical satellite imagery archives for time series analyses
Integration with innFactory
As a certified 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 planetary-scale analysis of geospatial data. It combines a petabyte-scale catalog of public, free-to-use geospatial datasets with a powerful analysis engine that runs in Google's cloud infrastructure.
What data is available?
Earth Engine contains a petabyte-scale catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial data, including sources such as Landsat, Sentinel, and MODIS, some with decades-long historical time series. The catalog is continuously expanded with new imagery.
Is Earth Engine free to use?
Earth Engine is free for noncommercial and academic use, subject to quotas on shared compute resources (Community Tier). Commercial projects are billed through Google Cloud.
Which programming languages are supported?
Earth Engine supports JavaScript (in the Code Editor), Python (including via Colab or local environments), and a REST API for authenticated HTTP access.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of Google Cloud (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by Google Cloud.
