Photos: Google Earth goes green
Google watches over the environment
By Nick Heath, 6 December 2010 17:08
Photo 1 of 5
Google has launched Google Earth Engine, a global mapping tool designed to track changes to the environment.
The engine consists of a database of satellite images of the Earth's surface dating back more than 25 years, and a set of software tools that spot and map environmental changes in those images.
The Earth Engine platform is being made available to researchers and scientists worldwide to help with projects such as mapping forests and water resources.
Google is donating 10 million CPU hours on its servers each year over the next two years to the Earth Engine platform for the analysis of the satellite images.
This is an example of one of the maps produced using Google Earth Engine, showing forest cover in Mexico.
It was created in less than a week, principally by analysing four years of images taken by the enhanced thermatic mapper onboard the Landsat 7 satellite and data from the Mexico National Forest Inventory.
Photo credit: Google
No comments:
Post a Comment