A planetary-scale platform for Earth science data & analysis

Earth Engine's public data archive includes more than forty years of historical imagery and scientific datasets, updated and expanded daily.

Climate and Weather

Thermal satellite sensors can provide surface temperature and emissivity information. The Earth Engine data catalog includes both land and sea surface temperature products derived from several spacecraft sensors, including MODIS, ASTER, and AVHRR, in addition to raw Landsat thermal data.

Climate models generate both long-term climate predictions and historical interpolations of surface variables. The Earth Engine catalog includes historical reanalysis data from NCEP/NCAR, gridded meteorological datasets like NLDAS-2, and GridMET, and climate model outputs like the University of Idaho MACAv2-METDATA and the NASA Earth Exchange’s Downscaled Climate Projections.

You can use atmospheric data to help correct image data from other sensors, or you can study it in its own right. The Earth Engine catalog includes atmospheric datasets such as ozone data from NASA's TOMS and OMI instruments and the MODIS Monthly Gridded Atmospheric Product.

Weather datasets describe forecasted and measured conditions over short periods of time, including precipitation, temperature, humidity, and wind, and other variables. Earth Engine includes forecast data from NOAA's Global Forecast System (GFS) and the NCEP Climate Forecast System (CFSv2), as well as sensor data from sources like the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM).

Imagery

Landsat, a joint program of the USGS and NASA, has been observing the Earth continuously from 1972 through the present day. Today the Landsat satellites image the entire Earth's surface at a 30-meter resolution about once every two weeks, including multispectral and thermal data.

The Copernicus Program is an ambitious initiative headed by the European Commission in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA). The Sentinels include all-weather radar images from Sentinel-1A and -1B, high-resolution optical images from Sentinel 2A and 2B, as well as ocean and land data suitable for environmental and climate monitoring from Sentinel 3.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites have been acquiring images of the Earth daily since 1999, including daily imagery, 16-day BRDF-adjusted surface reflectance, and derived products such as vegetation indices and snow cover.

High-resolution imagery captures the finer details of landscapes and urban environments. The US National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) offers aerial image data of the US at one-meter resolution, including nearly complete coverage every several years since 2003.

Geophysical

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) describe the shape of Earth’s terrain. The Earth Engine data catalog contains several global DEMs such as Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data at 30-meter resolution, regional DEMs at higher resolutions, and derived products such as the WWF's HydroSHEDS hydrology database.

Land cover maps describe the physical landscape in terms of land cover classes such as forest, grassland, and water. Earth Engine includes a wide variety of land cover datasets, from near real-time Dynamic World to global products such as ESA World Cover.

Cropland data is key to understanding global water consumption and agricultural production. Earth Engine includes a number of cropland data products such as the USDA NASS Cropland Data Layers, as well as layers from the Global Food Security-Support Analysis Data (GFSAD) including cropland extent, crop dominance, and watering sources.

Data from other satellite image sensors is available in Earth Engine as well, including night-time imagery from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS), which has collected imagery of night-time lights at approximately 1-kilometer resolution continuously since 1992.