Google Earth Engine is a platform that pairs a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis, running on Google's cloud infrastructure. Users detect changes, map trends and quantify differences on the Earth's surface using the Earth Engine API in Python or JavaScript, or a web-based code editor for interactive algorithm development. The public archive holds more than thirty years of imagery and over eighty petabytes of data, updated daily. A Satellite Embedding Dataset built with the AlphaEarth Foundations model packs a year of multi-source data into every 10m pixel. Earth Engine is free for academic and research use and is also available for commercial use.
It is built for scientists, academic researchers, remote sensing specialists, geospatial developers and non-profit teams who need to process large imagery collections without managing their own infrastructure. Users should be comfortable writing code, since analysis happens through scripts and the API. Organizations such as Global Forest Watch and the World Resources Institute are cited as examples of groups that rely on it.
Use cases include tracking tree cover change at high resolution, remote sensing research, predicting disease outbreaks, and managing natural resources. Researchers run their own algorithms over decades of satellite imagery to compare conditions over time, while humanitarian and conservation groups map trends in land use and environmental health. Developers can build geospatial applications on the API and use ready-to-use datasets instead of collecting and cleaning imagery themselves. Analysts working with the Satellite Embedding Dataset can feed analysis-ready, deep-learning-derived features into mapping and classification tasks.
