Google has announced it is making Google Earth Engine available to businesses and governments worldwide as an enterprise-grade service through Google Cloud.

Google Earth Engine was originally launched to scientists and NGOs in 2010 for use in "planetary-scale environmental monitoring". It combines data from hundreds of satellites and earth observation datasets with cloud computing for analysis of the state of the world’s habitats and ecosystems and how they’re changing over time.

The increased availability of Earth Engine is aimed at business organizations who want to improve their sustainability. Rebecca Moore, Director of Google Earth, said:

"Over the years, business and governments have been increasingly approaching us to accelerate their sustainability transformations."

Underpinning the engine is one of the largest publicly available data catalogs and a global data archive that goes back 50 years and updates every 15 minutes, providing over 70 petabytes of analysis-ready geospatial data. This means researchers can look for detect trends and correlations between human activities and what's happening in the environment. 

The system can be integrated with analytics and tools such as BigQuery and Vertex AI, and it comes with JavaScript, Python, and REST APIs.  The APIs Include JavaScript and Python wrapper functions to translate complex geospatial analysis into Earth Engine requests. There's also a Web-based IDE focused on hypothesis testing for writing and running scripts that Google says is ideal for prototyping and iteration.

Earth Engine will be available at no charge to government researchers, least-developed countries, tribal nations and news organizations, and will remain available at no cost for nonprofit organizations and research scientists for non-commercial and research projects.

For commercial organizations, the pricing model is based on consumption of Earth Engine resources (compute units and storage) and a monthly subscription fee of $500 per month for basic, and $2000 per month for Professional levels.

More Information

Earth Engine Website

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