Google Earth Engine Overview

Image via WikipediaWatch the following video to learn more about this BRAND new technology from Google! - Amazing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnCf9Gjz720&feature=player_embedded

http://google.org/earthengine | Learn more about Google Earth Engine, a new platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data -- current and historical -- online for the first time and enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth's environment. It aims to show "how the earth is changing under a changing climate, and use that information to drive public policy... We're hoping that it will elevate people's understanding of the planet."
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The philanthropic arm of Google is launched a new technology platform on Thursday, December 9, 2010, that will allow worldwide monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth's environment.
Google Earth Engine draws on 25 years of satellite images collected by LANDSAT, the longest continuing orbiting satellite on earth.
The new product, from Google.org - Google Technology-Driven Philanthropy - the philanthropic arm of the company. This web site lists Google's philanthropic activities.
This was developed over the past two years and will post online for free, could prove critical in helping developing nations track deforestation rates in real time as well as other key environmental changes. One of the few substantive achievements the United Nations climate talks may produce is an agreement on how to compensate rainforest nations for preserving their forests in order to absorb carbon dioxide, but these efforts need to be validated by tracking data that proves the regions in question face the pressure of deforestation and have been able to resist it.
Google is providing 20 million CPU hours free of charge to the developing world and scientific community in order to help these groups take advantage of the new analytical tool. This could provide a basis for enforcing agreements forged under the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD), which may be finalized as early as next week in Cancun. Google hopes that the Earth Engine will emerge as a critical tool in the enforcement of land management initiatives such as the UN's REDD programme in which wealthier nations pay developing nations to preserve rainforests.
Usually Google Labs - Explore Google's New Ideas products are cloaked in secrecy. However, you can play around with prototypes of some of Google's wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them
In the case of Google's Earth Engine , however, they have drawn on collaboration with scientists such as Greg Asner - Carnegie Institution for Science, Carlos Souza of Imazon and Matt Hansen - Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University to refine the forest monitoring tool.
Along with Hansen and Conafor - Comisión Nacional Forestal. Información sobre el organismo, sus visiones, misiones y programas para integrar, organizar, actualizar y difundir la - [ Translate this page ], Mexico's national forestry commission, Google has already used the platform to create the finest-scale forest and water map ever made of Mexico. It required 15,000 hours of computation, which normally would have taken three years if run on a single computer, but the group completed it in less than a day on the Google Earth Engine by using 1,000 computers running simultaneous (in parallel) to process more than 53,000 LANDSAT scenes taken between 1984 and 2010. CONAFOR provided data it had collected on the ground to calibrate and validate the algorithm.
Hopefully, and we are all optimistic about this, policymakers can make progress on saving temperate and tropical forests worldwide, in part because of technological advances and the political will in both developed and developing nations.

Related articles

• New Google Earth Engine (news.sciencemag.org)
• Google lends its massive computing cloud in fight against deforestation (news.mongabay.com)
• New Google Technology Monitors Environment (doyourpart.com)
• Amazon Tribe Using Android Phones to Combat Deforestation (intomobile.com)
• Google Unveils Powerful New Tool (huffingtonpost.com)
• Introducing Google Earth Engine (google.org)
• Google Earth Engine Revealed At COP 16 (techcrunch.com)

Use Your Computer To Help Study Global Warming

Photograph from: Prairie Musings.com > Environmental Things > Global Warming and Pollution

We all know that global warming is a serious issue; let alone whether it is part of a natural cycle; let alone whether it is caused by humans, or not.

We also know that some academic, scientific folks have difficulty in wording an invitation, but they / we need your; more specifically your computers help. We are building a super-computer by linking all, or as many computers on the Internet as possible, together to address this global concern.

Here is how the academics put it. However you put it, this is a serious issue, requiring serious consideration by serious folks:

“The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models (read more about this). By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle.

This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs.

By using your computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.”