Google Earth Engine

Google Earth Engine is a Google Cloud product that pairs a large catalogue of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with Google's computing, so an analysis runs on Google's servers instead of on the user's own machine.³ Google describes its users as researchers, nonprofits, educators and government agencies, who use it to detect changes, map trends and measure differences on the Earth's surface.^1,2 The paper to cite is Gorelick and co-authors, "Google Earth Engine: Planetary-scale geospatial analysis for everyone", in Remote Sensing of Environment, 2017.²

The public catalogue holds more than eighty petabytes of data and is updated and expanded daily.¹ Google's pages put its reach back in time at more than thirty years on the home page and more than forty years in the catalogue and FAQ.^1,2,4 It includes the whole USGS and NASA Landsat archive, which has imaged the Earth since 1972 and now covers the surface at 30-metre resolution about every two weeks.^2,4 Alongside it are daily MODIS imagery going back to 1999 and Sentinel radar and optical imagery.⁴ There is US aerial photography at one metre (NAIP) and global elevation at 30 metres (SRTM).⁴ Land cover maps include Dynamic World and ESA WorldCover.⁴ Weather and climate data run from forecasts through reanalysis to downscaled climate projections.⁴ The Satellite Embedding Dataset, built with Google's AlphaEarth Foundations model, packs a year of data from several sources into every 10-metre pixel.¹ Users can upload their own raster and vector data, such as GeoTIFFs and shapefiles.²

There are two ways to work. The Code Editor is a web page for writing JavaScript, with a map, a console, a task list, drawing tools for marking areas, and a link button to share a script.⁵ The Python client library, earthengine-api, is already installed in Google Colab and otherwise installs with pip or conda; it has to be authenticated and tied to a Google Cloud project before use.⁶ Work can run interactively for quick looks or as batch jobs for large ones.³ Results can be exported to Google Drive or Cloud Storage, downloaded into Python's data tools, or published as small web apps.³ Machine-learning tools for classification, regression and image segmentation are built in.³ Google says the scripts a user writes and the results of the analysis belong to the user.² The client libraries are open source under Apache-2.0; the processing itself happens on Google's side.^5,10

Access starts by registering a Google Cloud project.² It is free for noncommercial use by nonprofits, by students and staff at schools and universities for research or teaching, by news organisations, by trainers and trainees during a course, and by individuals.⁷ A government agency gets it free if it is in a UN Least Developed Country, is a recognised Indigenous government, or is doing scholarly research.⁷ Government work that is maintained on an ongoing basis needs a commercial licence.⁷ Free users may not use it for paid fee-for-service work.⁷ Since 27 April 2026 Google has been rolling out a monthly compute quota for each noncommercial project, counted in EECU-hours (an hour of one Earth Engine compute unit, Google's measure of processing power).⁸ The default Community tier allows 150 a month.⁸ The Contributor tier allows 1,000 and needs a billing account, though noncommercial use is not charged.⁸ The Partner tier allows 100,000 and is by application, for climate and nature work.⁸ Past the quota, work still runs but more slowly, and noncommercial status has to be reverified every year.⁸ Commercial use can be pay-as-you-go on the Limited plan, or a monthly plan: Basic at $500 and Professional at $2,000, each with some compute and storage included, and Premium priced on request.⁹ Compute beyond that costs $0.40 per EECU-hour, falling to $0.28 and $0.16 at higher monthly volumes.⁹

For someone modelling a place, Earth Engine gets the ground under the model without downloading whole archives.³ Land cover, elevation and decades of imagery can be clipped to a watershed or county and exported as inputs.^3,4 Whether that is free depends on who is doing it and why: a nonprofit's or a student's noncommercial project qualifies, while a government agency running it as an ongoing service needs a commercial licence.⁷