by John Anderson, Software Engineer, Google Earth Our hearts are with everyone affected by the wildfires in greater Los Angeles. To support first responders and the community, today we’ve launched a new project in Google Earth that shows satellite imagery of the Palisades, Eaton and Sunset fires. The satellite imagery in today’s release was taken on January 9th at approximately 10:30am PT by Airbus’s Pleiades Neo satellites, and we will be updating it as new information becomes available. Our goal with this customized map is to make wildfire imagery more accessible during this crisis, to ..read more

by Andy Blank, Software Engineer for Google Earth Engine How often do you reach into your proverbial toolbox for code like myCollection.geometry().bounds()? It’s a common Earth Engine idiom for a common geospatial problem: you need a bounding box around a collection of features or images. If you’ve used this recipe enough, you’ve probably felt boxed in by how long it can take. You may have wondered, why does Earth Engine need that much time to compute a simple box? The reason lies in the structure of the code. To run myCollection.geometry().bounds(), Earth Engine first computes myCo ..read more

By Alicia Sullivan, Product Manager & Katelyn Tarrio, Student Researcher, Google Earth Engine At Google, we have a long history of investing in efforts to combat deforestation. Earlier this year, we shared how Google Earth and Earth Engine have helped countries avoid emissions from deforestation, estimated at 95 megatons of CO2 equivalent — and get REDD+ payments in return. Now, we’re going a step further by focusing on one of the major drivers of deforestation: commodity crop production. Working to halt deforestation Commodity crops such as oil palm, cocoa and rubber are major contr ..read more

by Chris Welhoelter, Software Engineer, Earth Engine Computing statistics about regions of an image is a core Earth Engine capability. For instance, say you have an image that represents tree canopy coverage. You might want to calculate the average coverage for each census tract in your city in order to join the output on census data and study the health benefits of urban trees. Computing zonal statistics like this on a very large scale has important applications in machine learning pipelines and elsewhere but has historically been difficult or impossible because the Earth Engine in ..read more

by Raleigh Seamster, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach Back in September, we announced new features and capabilities coming to Google Earth web and mobile, which just finished rolling out to all users this month. The updates include changes to the way people work with multiple projects, and this blog post includes tips for making the most of the updates. So what’s different about working across multiple projects? In the latest Google Earth update, we made projects a more powerful hub for your data by giving you the ability to focus on one project at a time and introducing the a ..read more

by Raleigh Seamster, Senior Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach From the lush rainforests of Brazil to the rolling emerald hills of Ireland, experts from around the world gathered at the 2024 Geo for Good Summit to tackle some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time. This year’s summits, held in São Paulo and Dublin, showcased groundbreaking applications of geospatial technology in areas like nature conservation, climate change mitigation, and sustainable agriculture. Read on to discover the latest advances in Earth Engine and learn how the developer community is lev ..read more

Patrik Blohmé, Product Manager, Google Earth Today we announced how we’re helping urban planners get detailed insights about the world with the pilot of a new chat feature — Gemini capabilities in Google Earth. With this feature, urban planners can reduce the time spent finding, preparing and analyzing data from days to just minutes, without GIS training or code. This enables them to unlock the power of Google Earth’s geospatial data and Gemini capabilities to simplify complex tasks, perform detailed geospatial analysis and accelerate urban planning decisions. https://medium.com/media/285 ..read more

By Justin Braaten, Google DevRel, on behalf of the Earth Engine front end team Earth Engine users, we’re happy to announce a major milestone: the Python client library has graduated to v1.0.0! This release marks the culmination of a year’s work bringing the library to a level of maturity and reliability that warrants the major version 1 designation. With this promotion, we’re signaling confidence in delivering a robust, well-supported interface to Earth Engine’s service, providing unparalleled ease and computational power for geospatial data processing and analysis within the Python scien ..read more

By Okalo Ikhena, Director, Product Management, Google Sustainability With nineteen years of experience mapping the world down to the city, street, and even infrastructure level, we have a unique understanding of the built environment, which contributes around 40% of total global energy-related CO2 emissions¹. We can leverage our understanding of the built environment and the designs and infrastructure decisions that shape it to help create a more sustainable future. Today, sustainability professionals like you are time-crunched industry experts wearing many hats. You rely on multiple software ..read more

By Bryan Horowitz and Julian Helguero-Kelley, Google Earth Product Managers For nearly two decades, Google Earth has connected people to our planet. It’s a real-world canvas for exploration, a tool for planning, and a platform for understanding our changing world. And now, it’s getting even better. Last year we announced updates to Google Earth to make geospatial work and collaboration across teams and devices easier. In the coming weeks, we’re launching new capabilities that make it easier for professionals like you to manage and share your data and projects. We’re also giving you acces ..read more