Something to be Positive About

This sounds like good news to me. Google announces the Google Earth Engine...



Having worked with a company that built ground stations and collected remote sensing data and made claims for years that it wanted to "help the world" by making the data available, I became cynical. The urge to collect fees was like feudal Europe: all the tolls meant nobody went anywhere. But Google is in the business of hiding fees in a way that makes things "free" and lets things flourish. Google makes a ton of money, but it does it in a way that lowers costs for users so the users are happy and willing to jump in and use the data. Finally, after 30+ years, all the Landsat data will be easily accessible (hopefully freely accessible) for analysis.

Here's a bit from a report that tempers my enthusiasm:

In its current form, users of GEE can view imagery that had been processed previously with some basic image classification. Landsat and MODIS imagery are available for viewing from many choices in a limited image catalog. Users can select imagery from the catalog and view the data in the GEE workspace. Many organizations were involved in the image processing effort and they should be commended for this project. It is truly a step in bringing image classification to the masses.

But while this effort is a tremendous step forward, most geospatial remote sensing scientists will have to wait for what we really want...real-time, online image processing. You can't do much with the GEE platform right now. And that will only come with the release of the GEE API that is now only available to a small handful of partners. You can email them if you want access.

Right now, you'll have to be satisfied with simply viewing the results of image processing by others. But I had a hard time discerning what the imagery was trying to portray. The lack of a legend for each classified image hinders interpretation. Sorry, but a map isn't a map without a legend. You can choose an image to view, zoom and pan, but not much more. Viewers will have to go to each project website for more details (a link is supplied with some project imagery). Check out the Map Gallery for examples.

Oh well... here's hoping they move to make the real-time tools available to let you do image classification and analysis. Putting information into the hands of people unleashes incredible advances in knowledge. Some kid in some corner of the world will amaze us with new technologies if we can let him get his hands on this satellite data with the computing power to seriously investigate it.