This year the
Google Earth Engine team and I attended the European Geosciences Union General Assembly meeting in Vienna, Austria to engage with a number of European geoscientific partners. This was just the first of a series of European summits the team has attended over the past few months, including, most recently, the
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society meeting held last week in Milan, Italy.
Noel Gorelick presenting Google Earth Engine at EGU 2015
We are very excited to be collaborating with many European scientists from esteemed institutions such as the
European Commission Joint Research Centre,
Wageningen University, and
University of Pavia. These researchers are
utilizing the Earth Engine geospatial analysis platform to address issues of global importance in areas such as food security, deforestation detection, urban settlement detection, and freshwater availability.
Thanks to the enlightened free and open data policy of the European Commission and European Space Agency, we are pleased to announce the availability of
Copernicus Sentinel-1 data through Earth Engine for visualization and analysis. Sentinel-1, a radar imaging satellite with the ability to see through clouds, is the first of at least 6
Copernicus satellites going up in the next 6 years.
Sentinel-1 data visualized using Earth Engine, showing Vienna (left) and Milan (right).
Wind farms seen off the Eastern coast of England
This radar data offers a powerful complement to other optical and thermal data from satellites like Landsat, that are already available in the Earth Engine public data catalog. If you are a geoscientist interested in accessing and analyzing the newly available EC/ESA Sentinel-1 data, or anything else in our multi-petabyte data catalog, please
sign up for Google Earth Engine.
We look forward to further engagements with the European research community and are excited to see what the world will do with the data from the European Union's Copernicus program satellites.
Posted by Luc Vincent, Engineering Director, Geo Imagery
