Google Earth Engine 101

Google Earth Engine is a geospatial processing service. With Earth Engine, you can perform geospatial processing at scale, powered by Google Cloud Platform. The purpose of Earth Engine is to:

• Provide an interactive platform for geospatial algorithm development at scale
• Enable high-impact, data-driven science
• Make substantive progress on global challenges that involve large geospatial datasets

Google Earth Engine combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities and makes it available for scientists, researchers, and developers to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth's surface.

The Earth Engine API (application programming interface) provides the ability to create your own algorithms to process raster and vector imagery.

This session is geared toward people who would like to analyze satellite and vector data without access to computing resources typically required for that work on local computers. The session is hands-on, using the Earth Engine Javascript code editor.

The first part of the class will be an overview of the Google Earth Engine Platform, and Remote Sensing, in general. The second half will focus on accessing imagery, creating composites, and running analyses over stacks of images, computing statistics on imagery, creating charts and exporting the results of your analyses.

No previous experience with Earth Engine or JavaScript is necessary for the beginner workshop, but programming experience, basic knowledge of remote sensing and/or GIS are highly desirable.

Please note that this workshop was presented for Stanford University affiliates, and that the recording and materials are provided without access to Google Earth Engine, included.

For best results, use a modern, Chromium-based browser.

To sign up for Google Earth Engine, go to:  https://signup.earthengine.google.com 

The slides below are the same as those covered in the webinar video. You can open these slides in a separate widow in order to follow along and have access to the linked URLs.

Once you have signed up for and received confirmation of your Google Earth Engine account, you can copy the script repository for this webinar by clicking on the following link, which will redirect you to the Google Earth Engine Code Editor and import a series of scripts designed to introduce you to the basic mechanics of working in Google Earth Engine.

This one doesn't really have a tutorial text, since it's really about looking at the code, and what it is doing. The code in the Sample Scripts above is well-commented, and should make for a pretty straightforward walk-through. For those that like to read, the following is the original instructors notes document I used as a jumping off point for this workshop. Much of it will be redundant, if you watch the video, but a few things, like the difference between running things locally, or on the server, I just gloss over, and are better covered, here:

This webinar was presented on January 24th, 2021. It's a slightly modified version of the Google Earth Outreach Team's GEE101, which is taught each year at Google's Geo4Good Summit.

As noted, this webinar is a modified version of the Google Earth Outreach Team's own beginning workshop. You can find more materials to help you learn to use Google Earth Engine at:  https://developers.google.com/earth-engine 

• The Google Earth Engine Data Catalog -  https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets  - Earth Engine's 60+ Petabyte public data archive includes more than forty years of historical imagery and scientific datasets, updated and expanded daily.
• JavaScript, REST and Python Guides -  https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/guides  - Google Earth Engine includes Python, JavaScript and REST APIs. The Quickstart for the REST API can be found, here:  https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/reference/Quickstart 
• The Google Earth Engine Developers Group represents nearly a decade of support and open development on the Google Earth Engine platform. If you can't find the answer you are looking for in the archive, the members of this forum are friendly, prompt and helpful with GEE questions:  https://groups.google.com/g/google-earth-engine-developers