Remote Sensing

The Water Department queries and downloads remote sensing data from Google’s Earth Engine (EE). Earth Engine is a data archive hosting programmatic access to the world’s largest repository of freely available satellite imagery. With the Earth Engine Python API, a set of customized python scripts send queries and retrieve summarized output for land management units in Owens Valley. The data is both stored in on Google’s servers and the Earth Engine queries are executed on Google’s cloud computing infrastructure, eliminating two obstacles that traditionally has challenged monitoring vegetation change with satellite imagery.


The set of tools used to query Earth Engine is available on GitHub (https://github.com/Map-Water/ee-tools).