Scientific Computing with Python
Austin, Texas • July 6-12
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Wednesday 10:15 a.m.–10:45 a.m.

Real-time Crunching of Petabytes of Geospatial Data with Google Earth Engine

Tyler Erickson, Randy Sargent

Audience level:

Description

Google Earth Engine is a platform designed to enable petabyte-scale scientific analysis and visualization of geospatial datasets. Earth Engine provides a consolidated environment including a massive data catalog co-located with thousands of computers for analysis. This talk will discuss products that Earth Engine has produced, and how to access Earth Engine via its Python API.

Abstract

Background

  • What is Earth Engine at a high level?
  • Why did the Earth Engine (EE) project start? To monitor global deforestation.
  • What architecture design decisions were made, and why?
    • Just-in-time computation model
    • Lazy evaluation for real-time feedback

The Earth Engine Python API

  • PyPI package: earthengine-api
  • OAuth authentication
  • Using IPython Notebooks for algorithm development
    • Special display methods for interactive maps

Philosophical goals and how they are manifested

  • Organize the world's (geospatial) information and make it universally accessible and useful
  • Facilitate open transparent science
  • Speed up science by reducing the effort required to test hypotheses
  • Enable collaborative algorithm development

Selected Results

The Future

  • Global-scale analysis challenges
  • An invitation for developers