Earth Engine Launch at COP-16
Tags: cop, earth-engine, forests, google
At the United Nations COP-16 international climate change conference in Cancun in December, 2010 — exactly one year after we had first the announced the Earth Engine project at COP-15 in Copenhagen — we officially unveiled the first version of the Earth Engine platform to the world. You can read all about it in the Official Google Blog post.
At this stage Earth Engine was available to a small but growing community of Trusted Testers, most of whom were still focused on applications related to global forest monitoring. We did release a public data gallery powered by the Earth Engine API to the public (left), so anyone could begin to explore the Landsat and MODIS data and other data available in the Earth Engine database. Our Trusted Testers, however, had access to the first version of the Earth Engine web API.
At this point we had also built the the platform's first large-scale batch processing capabilities, and we excercised them first with our science partners Matt Hansen (then at South Dakota State Univiersity) and CONAFOR (Mexico’s National Forestry Commission) to mine the Landsat 7 archive to produce the first cloud-free 30-meter-per-pixel forest cover map of Mexico (top).
