It took Google 2 ½ years to convert 40 years of Landsat
imagery from tapes stored in USGS archives to the cloud. Two petabytes of data
in total. Now all this data is made available to researchers and non-profit
organisation for comparison and number-crunching through the Google Earth
Engine tool under the Google Earth Outreach program.
There is a great expectation that free access to data and significant
computational capability will lead to a surge in public benefit maps coming out
of Australia.
Organisations that have already partnered with Google to access a suite of GIS products
and learn how to use them for free include the Australian Wildlife Conservancy
(AWC) and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA).
Despite numerous attempts over the years to open up the vaults of valuable satellite data to
academics, research institutions and individuals it took a determined private
company to make it all possible. A good example of public-private collaboration
that is probably a sign of things to come. This is a side of Google that we all
would like to hear about more often.
More free data: Satellite Imagery Catalogue
More free data: Satellite Imagery Catalogue
2 comments:
The Landsat archive is freely available through the U.S. Geological Survey and has been since 2008. Check out http://landsatlook.usgs.gov.
True, but only as individual scenes which you have to download and use your own "tools" to do something useful with it. Just imagine the cost and time it would take to download 10 TB of data for Australia... and if every interested researcher does it individually on his/her own :-)
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