Google Earth Engine, an amazing tool for scientists and researchers, released at COP 16

Yesterday at the International Climate Change Conference, Google released a mountain of data for scientists around the world to analyze and use. Known as "Google Earth Engine", it gives researchers access to this huge pile of data, along with computing power to deal with all of it.

The data includes Landsat satellite data and "trillions of scientific measurements" covering the past 25 years.

So what can be done with all of this data? Thanks to some launch partners, there are already a handful of projects underway. For example, below is a map showing the loss of forest cover in the Congo for the past 10 years, taken from the Earth Engine Map Gallery.

To go along with this, Google is also donating 10 million CPU-hours for each of the next two years, to help developing nations track the state of their forests. This is in anticipation forREDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), which offers financial incentives for tropical nations that protect their forests.

Do you plan to use Google Earth Engine? If not, what would you use it for if you had the chance?

Find a Snowboard with Google Maps

urton Snowboards - Dealer Locator

Burton Snowboards has used the Google Maps for Flash API to provide an impressive store locator.

Using the store locator you can find a Burton store near you by entering your address in the search box. The stores closest to your address are then listed in the map sidebar. If you click on one of the listed stores the map pans and rotates to show the chosen store.

The information window for each store includes the name and address of the store and a link to get directions to the store.

Real-Time Streetcars on Google Maps

Where is my Streetcar?

This Google Map shows the real-time position of streetcars in Toronto.

Using the map you can find out how long you will have to wait for a streetcar at any of the city's stops. You can select your stop from a drop-down menu at the top of the map and you can choose to view either westbound or southbound streetcars or both.

The real-time position of the streetcars are then displayed on the map with arrows that display their direction of travel. The map uses City of Toronto Open Data, using feeds provided by NextBus and the TTC.

The whole project is open source, so if you think you can improve the map you can view and edit the source.

Introducing Google Earth Engine

Today, we launched a new Google Labs product called Google Earth Engine at theInternational Climate Change Conference in sunny Cancun, Mexico. Google Earth Engine is a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data—current and historical—online for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment. The platform will enable scientists to use our extensive computing infrastructure—the Google “cloud”—to analyze this imagery. Last year, we demonstrated an early prototype. Since then, we have developed the platform, and are excited now to offer scientists around the world access to Earth Engine to implement their applications.

Why is this important? The images of our planet from space contain a wealth of information, ready to be extracted and applied to many societal challenges. Scientific analysis can transform these images from a mere set of pixels into useful information—such as the locations and extent of global forests, detecting how our forests are changing over time, directing resources for disaster response or water resource mapping.

The challenge has been to cope with the massive scale of satellite imagery archives, and the computational resources required for their analysis. As a result, many of these images have never been seen, much less analyzed. Now, scientists will be able to build applications to mine this treasure trove of data on Google Earth Engine, providing several advantages:

• Landsat satellite data archives over the last 25 years for most of the developing world available online, ready to be used together with other datasets including MODIS. And we will soon offer a complete global archive of Landsat.
• Reduced time to do analyses, using Google’s computing infrastructure. By running analyses across thousands of computers, for example, unthinkable tasks are now possible for the first time.
• New features that will make analysis easier, such as tools that pre-process the images to remove clouds and haze.
• Collaboration and standardization by creating a common platform for global data analysis.
  

Google Earth Engine can be used for a wide range of applications—from mapping water resources to ecosystem services to deforestation. It’s part of our broader effort at Google tobuild a more sustainable future. We’re particularly excited about an initial use of Google Earth Engine to support development of systems to monitor, report and verify (MRV) efforts to stop global deforestation.

Deforestation releases a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere, accounting for 12-18% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The world loses 32 million acres of tropical forests every year, an area the size of Greece. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to tropical nations to protect their forests. Reaching an agreement on early development of REDD is a key agenda item here in Cancun.

Today, we announced that we are donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities. We believe Google Earth Engine will bring transparency and more certainty to global efforts to stop deforestation.

Over the past two years, we’ve been working with several top scientists to fully develop this platform and integrate their desktop software to work online with the data available in Google Earth Engine. Those scientists—Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Carlos Souza of Imazon and Matt Hansen of the Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University—are at the cutting edge of forest monitoring in support of climate science.

In collaboration with Matt Hansen and CONAFOR, Mexico’s National Forestry Commission, we’ve produced a forest cover and water map of Mexico. This is the finest-scale forest map produced of Mexico to date. The map required 15,000 hours of computation, but was completed in less than a day on Google Earth Engine, using 1,000 computers over more than 53,000 Landsat scenes (1984-2010). CONAFOR provided National Forest Inventory ground-sampled data to calibrate and validate the algorithm.

A forest cover and water map of Mexico (southern portion, including the Yucatan peninsula), produced in collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen and CONAFOR.

We hope that Google Earth Engine will be an important tool to help institutions around the world manage forests more wisely. As we fully develop the platform, we hope more scientists will use new Earth Engine API to integrate their applications online—for deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response, water resource mapping and other beneficial uses. If you’re interested in partnering with us, we want to hear from you—visit our website! We look forward to seeing what’s possible when scientists, governments, NGO’s, universities, and others gain access to data and computing resources to collaborate online to help protect the earth’s environment.

Google Earth Pro 6: Measure your world in 3D

We’re excited to announce a new addition to the Advanced Measurement Tool Suite in Google Earth Pro: you can now measure in 3D!

Pro customers recently ranked Area Measurement as one of the most valuable Google Earth Pro tools, so we wanted to add more to the package. In a continued effort to mirror the real world, allowing you to lift measurements off the ground and extend them in to the 3D realm seemed a natural next step.

We think these tools will be beneficial to our customers as there are limitless applications for their use. 3D Measurements can be used by engineers to plan wind farms, real estate firms to determine skyline views for new high rise buildings, construction companies to measure the materials needed for a retrofitting, architects to calculate the space between buildings, and more.

To measure buildings and distances between buildings, just turn on the 3D Buildings layer and click the Ruler Tool icon in the toolbar. If you’re running Google Earth Pro, you’ll notice two new tabs for measuring in 3D: 3D Path and 3D Polygon.

Here are a few examples of what the new Pro 3D Measurement Tools have to offer.

Measure the height or width of a 3D building:

Measure the area of the face of a 3D building:

Measure the distance between a building and a point on the ground or another building:

If you’re new to Google Earth Pro, try it for free for 7 days or buy Google Earth Pro today and discover how 3D Measurements can benefit your business. Onward and upward!

Facebook Location Updates on Google Maps

Fourtrace

Fourtrace is a research project from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The application uses location updates that users from Foursquare have made publicly available through Twitter, and presents them on a Google Map.

To use Fourtrace you just need to enter a Facebook user name and then the user's location history will be presented on a map. If the user name is rejected then the person you searched for probably hasn't connected their Foursquare account with Twitter.

If the Foursquare account is connected to Twitter you can then visualise all the location check-ins made on Foursquare. If you click on the map markers you can also read the Tweet made from that location.

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Limp Bizkit Videos on Google Maps

Follow the Nookie

Fans of Limp Bizkit will be sure to love this Google Map that displays hundreds of Limp Bizkit videos taken from the band's tours.

You can select to view videos from 1996 to 2010 using the drop-down menu. Once you have selected a year Limp Bizkit's tour appearances from that year are displayed on the map. If you click on any of the displayed map markers live videos from that concert are shown in the map sidebar.

If you select a video from the sidebar you can watch the video directly from the map.

UK Jobs on Google Maps

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UK job searching website TotalJobs has introduced a new Google Maps based interface to display jobs vacancies geographically.

Totaljobs attracts 2.9 million jobseekers each month. The new maps tool allows up to 200 jobs to be located on just one map. People searching for jobs in London, for example, are able to search for jobs within a specified distance of their chosen location and see these highlighted on the map.

If you click on a map marker you can view the job details and potential jobs can then be selected and dropped into your job basket.

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Kayaking Around New Zealand

NZKayaker

Tim Taylor set off today to try to set the record for making the first continuous solo circumnavigation of New Zealand by kayak. You can follow Tim's progress live on a real-time Google Map.

Tim is using the SPOT Personal Tracker to show his progress on his journey. SPOT Personal Tracker allows you to send and save your location with a SPOT GPS unit and display your location in near real time using Google Maps.

Tim will be kayaking over 5000 km on his journey, which will take him about 100 days. He hopes to finish his attempt sometime in April 2011.

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Report Local Problems with Google Maps

Neat Streets

Australian website Neat Streets allows anyone to report community problems which are then passed on to the appropriate authorities. The application works in both Australia and New Zealand.

You can download a Neat Streets application for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android based phones. With the apps you can take pictures and submit community problems directly from your smartphone. The latest submitted photos and problems are displayed on a Google Map on the Neat Streets website home page.

Using Neat Streets you can report road obstructions, vandalism, potholes, fallen trees, abandoned trolleys, litter, and graffiti. Neat Streets then automatically forwards the reports to the appropriate authority based on the GPS location

Also See

• SeeClickFix - US site for citizens to report local problems
• FixMyStreet - UK site, allows citizens to report local problems. All problems are then passed onto local government
• Verbeterdebuurt - Dutch local problems reporting site
• Gerecht Geht Anders - German local problem reporting website

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