Climate reanalysis and climate projection datasets offer the potential for researchers, students and instructors to access physically informed, global scale, temporally and spatially continuous climate data from the latter half of the 20th century to present, and explore different potential future climates. While these data are of significant use to research and teaching within biological, environmental and social sciences, potential users often face barriers to processing and accessing the data that cannot be overcome without specialist knowledge, facilities or assistance. Consequently, climate reanalysis and projection data are currently substantially under-utilised within research and education communities. To address this issue, we present two simple “point-and-click” graphical user interfaces: the Google Earth Engine Climate Tool (GEEClimT), providing access to climate reanalysis data products; and Google Earth Engine CMIP6 Explorer (GEECE), allowing processing and extraction of CMIP6 projection data, including the ability to create custom model ensembles. Together GEEClimT and GEECE provide easy access to over 387 terabytes of data that can be output in commonly used spreadsheet (CSV) or raster (GeoTIFF) formats to aid subsequent offline analysis. Data included in the two tools include: 20 atmospheric, terrestrial and oceanic reanalysis data products; a new dataset of annual resolution climate variables (comparable to WorldClim) calculated from ERA5-Land data for 1950-2022; and CMIP6 climate projection output for 34 model simulations for historical, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios. New data products can also be easily added to the tools as they become available within the Google Earth Engine Data Catalog. Five case studies that use data from both tools are also provided. These show that GEEClimT and GEECE are easily expandable tools that remove multiple barriers to entry that will open use of climate reanalysis and projection data to a new and wider range of users.

ERA5-Land is a reanalysis dataset providing a consistent view of the evolution of land variables over several decades at an enhanced resolution compared to ERA5. ERA5-Land has been produced by replaying the land component of the ECMWF ERA5 climate reanalysis. Reanalysis combines model data with observations from across the world into a globally complete and consistent dataset using the laws of physics. Reanalysis produces data that goes several decades back in time, providing an accurate description of the climate of the past. This dataset includes all 50 variables as available on CDS. ERA5-Land data is available from 1950 to three months from real-time. Please consult the ERA5-Land "Known Issues" section. In particular, note that three components of the total evapotranspiration have values swapped as follows: variable "Evaporation from bare soil" (mars parameter code 228101 (evabs)) has the values corresponding to the "Evaporation from vegetation transpiration" (mars parameter 228103 (evavt)), variable "Evaporation from open water surfaces excluding oceans (mars parameter code 228102 (evaow)) has the values corresponding to the "Evaporation from bare soil" (mars parameter code 228101 (evabs)), variable "Evaporation from vegetation transpiration" (mars parameter code 228103 (evavt)) has the values corresponding to the "Evaporation from open water surfaces excluding oceans" (mars parameter code 228102 (evaow)). The asset is a daily aggregate of ECMWF ERA5 Land hourly assets which includes both flow and non-flow bands. Flow bands are formed by collecting the first hour's data of the following day which holds aggregated sum of previous day and while the non-flow bands are created by averaging all hourly data of the day. The flow bands are labeled with the "_sum" identifier, which approach is different from the daily data produced by Copernicus Climate Data Store, where flow bands are averaged too. Daily aggregates have been pre-calculated to facilitate many applications requiring easy and fast access to the data. Precipitation and other flow (accumulated) bands might occasionally have negative values, which doesn't make physical sense. At other times their values might be excessively high. This problem is due to how the GRIB format saves data: it simplifies or "packs" the data into smaller, less precise numbers, which can introduce errors. These errors get worse when the data varies a lot. Because of this, when we look at the data for a whole day to compute daily totals, sometimes the highest amount of rainfall recorded at one time can seem larger than the total rainfall measured for the entire day. To learn more, Please see: "Why are there sometimes small negative precipitation accumulations"

Introduction: Landslides are known to be one of the most frequent types of geological disasters. However, there is not an established method for large-scale, rapid, and high-precision landslide extraction. The quantitative impact of environmental changes on landslide development is also not well understood, which hinders accurate assessments and decision-making in environmental and disaster response. The polar regions, including the Antarctic, the Arctic, and the Tibetan plateau (TP), sensitive to global environmental changes, are significantly affected by global warming. This leads to extensive landslide development, particularly in the southern TP. This research focuses on new landslides in the southern TP, exploring extraction methods and the relationship between landslides and environmental factors.Methods: Utilizing the Google Earth Engine (GEE) and an improved Otsu threshold segmentation algorithm, we processed remote sensing images with 10 m resolution to identify landslide areas. The proposed Normalized Landslide Bare-soil Separation Index (NDLBSI) achieved an 87% pre-extraction accuracy in extracting landslides from Sentinel-2 images from 2019 to 2023. For the pre-extraction results, manual interpretation and correction were carried out, and a model correlating annual landslide changes with environmental factors was established based on least squares multivariate statistical methods.Results: Results show that a significant increase in landslide areas in the southern TP over the past 5 years, correlating with the watershed-wide increase in annual average temperature and vegetation cover, along with a decrease in snow cover area.Discussion: These changes could affect soil and rock moisture, influencing soil stability and landslide occurrence. The study provides valuable insights for large-scale landslide detection and understanding the environmental factors influencing landslides, which is of some significance for landslide hazards early warning.

Link to the Google Earth Engine (GEE) code: https://code.earthengine.google.com/cc3ea6593574e321acd7b68c975a9608

You can analyze and visualize the following spatial layers by accessing the GEE link:

Daytime summer land surface temperature (raster data, 30 m horizontal resolution, from Landsat-8 remote sensing data, years 2017-2022)

The surface thermal hot-spot pattern (raster data,30 m horizontal resolution) was obtained by using a statistical-spatial method based on the Getis-Ord Gi* approach through the ArcGIS tool.

Here attached the .txt file from the GEE code.

E-mail

Giulia Guerri, CNR-IBE, giulia.guerri@ibe.cnr.it

Marco Morabito, CNR-IBE, marco.morabito@cnr.it

Alfonso Crisci, CNR-IBE, alfonso.crisci@ibe.cnr.it

The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis Project is a joint project between the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP, formerly "NMC") and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The goal of this joint effort is to produce new atmospheric analyses using historical data as well as to produce analyses of the current atmospheric state (Climate Data Assimilation System, CDAS). The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis 1 project is using a state-of-the-art analysis/forecast system to perform data assimilation using past data from 1948 to the present. The data have 6-hour temporal resolution (0000, 0600, 1200, and 1800 UTC) and 2.5 degree spatial resolution.

Spatiotemporal patterns of global forest net primary productivity (NPP) are pivotal for us to understand the interaction between the climate and the terrestrial carbon cycle. In this study, we use Google Earth Engine (GEE), which is a powerful cloud platform, to study the dynamics of the global forest NPP with remote sensing and climate datasets. In contrast with traditional analyses that divide forest areas according to geographical location or climate types to retrieve general conclusions, we categorize forest regions based on their NPP levels. Nine categories of forests are obtained with the self-organizing map (SOM) method, and eight relative factors are considered in the analysis. We found that although forests can achieve higher NPP with taller, denser and more broad-leaved trees, the influence of the climate is stronger on the NPP; for the high-NPP categories, precipitation shows a weak or negative correlation with vegetation greenness, while lacking water may correspond to decrease in productivity for low-NPP categories. The low-NPP categories responded mainly to the La Niña event with an increase in the NPP, while the NPP of the high-NPP categories increased at the onset of the El Niño event and decreased soon afterwards when the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) wore off. The influence of the ENSO changes correspondingly with different NPP levels, which infers that the pattern of climate oscillation and forest growth conditions have some degree of synchronization. These findings may facilitate the understanding of global forest NPP variation from a different perspective.

PLEASE NOTE:

_ GEEBAM is an interim product and there is no ground truthing or assessment of accuracy. Fire Extent and Severity Mapping (FESM) data should be used for accurate information on fire severity and loss of biomass in relation to bushfires._

The intention of this dataset was to provide a rapid assessment of fire impact.

In collaboration with the University of NSW, the NSW Department of Planning Infrastructure and Environment (DPIE) Remote Sensing and Landscape Science team has developed a rapid mapping approach to find out where wildfires in NSW have affected vegetation. We call it the Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Map (GEEBAM) and it relies on Sentinel 2 satellite imagery. The product output is a TIFF image with a resolution of 15m. Burnt Area Classes:

1. Little change observed between pre and post fire

2. Canopy unburnt - A green canopy within the fire ground that may act as refugia for native fauna, may be affected by fire

3. Canopy partially affected - A mix of burnt and unburnt canopy vegetation

4. Canopy fully affected -The canopy and understorey are most likely burnt

Using GEEBAM at a local scale requires visual interpretation with reference to satellite imagery. This will ensure the best results for each fire or vegetation class.

Important Note: GEEBAM is an interim product and there is no ground truthing or assessment of accuracy. It is updated fortnightly.

Please see Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Factsheet

Please see Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Factsheet Data and Resources

The dataset used in the paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13061098See readme.md for detailed info on files. Date Submitted: 2021-03-15

Forest cover is rapidly changing at the global scale as a result of land-use change (principally deforestation in many tropical regions and afforestation in many temperate regions) and climate change. However, a detailed map of global forest gain is still lacking at fine spatial and temporal resolutions. In this study, we developed a new automatic framework to map annual forest gain across the globe, based on Landsat time series, the LandTrendr algorithm and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. First, samples of stable forest collected based on the Global Forest Change product (GFC) were used to determine annual Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) thresholds for forest gain detection. Secondly, with the NBR time-series from 1982 to 2020 and LandTrendr algorithm, we produced dataset of global forest gain year from 1984 to 2020 based on a set of decision rules. Our results reveal that large areas of forest gain occurred in China, Russia, Brazil and North America, and the vast majority of the global forest gain has occurred since 2000. The new dataset was consistent in both spatial extent and years of forest gain with data from field inventories and alternative remote sensing products. Our dataset is valuable for policy-relevant research on the net impact of forest cover change on the global carbon cycle and provides an efficient and transferable approach for monitoring other types of land cover dynamics.

PLEASE NOTE: _ GEEBAM is an interim product and there is no ground truthing or assessment of accuracy. Fire Extent and Severity Mapping (FESM) data should be used for accurate information on fire …Show full descriptionPLEASE NOTE: _ GEEBAM is an interim product and there is no ground truthing or assessment of accuracy. Fire Extent and Severity Mapping (FESM) data should be used for accurate information on fire severity and loss of biomass in relation to bushfires._ The intention of this dataset was to provide a rapid assessment of fire impact. In collaboration with the University of NSW, the NSW Department of Planning Infrastructure and Environment (DPIE) Remote Sensing and Landscape Science team has developed a rapid mapping approach to find out where wildfires in NSW have affected vegetation. We call it the Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Map (GEEBAM) and it relies on Sentinel 2 satellite imagery. The product output is a TIFF image with a resolution of 15m. Burnt Area Classes: Little change observed between pre and post fire Canopy unburnt - A green canopy within the fire ground that may act as refugia for native fauna, may be affected by fire Canopy partially affected - A mix of burnt and unburnt canopy vegetation Canopy fully affected -The canopy and understorey are most likely burnt Using GEEBAM at a local scale requires visual interpretation with reference to satellite imagery. This will ensure the best results for each fire or vegetation class. Important Note: GEEBAM is an interim product and there is no ground truthing or assessment of accuracy. It is updated fortnightly. Please see Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Factsheet

Nighttime satellite imagery were accessed via Google Earth Engine). Version 4 of the DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights Time Series consists of cloud-free composites made using all the available archived DMSP-OLS smooth resolution data for calendar years. In cases where two satellites were collecting data - two composites were produced. The products are 30 arc second grids, spanning -180 to 180 degrees longitude and -65 to 75 degrees latitude. Several attributes are included - we used stable_lights which represents lights from cities, towns, and other sites with persistent lighting, including gas flares. Ephemeral events, such as fires have been discarded. The background noise was identified and replaced with values of zero.These data were provided to Google Earth Engine by teh National Centers for Environmental Information - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States (see Supporting Documentation).CANUE staff exported the annual data and extracted values of annual mean nighttime brightness for all postal codes in Canada for each year from 1992 to 2013 (DMTI Spatial, 2015).

ERA5 is the fifth generation ECMWF atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate. Reanalysis combines model data with observations from across the world into a globally complete and consistent dataset. ERA5 replaces its predecessor, the ERA-Interim reanalysis. ERA5 MONTHLY provides aggregated values for each month for seven ERA5 climate reanalysis parameters: 2m air temperature, 2m dewpoint temperature, total precipitation, mean sea level pressure, surface pressure, 10m u-component of wind and 10m v-component of wind. Additionally, monthly minimum and maximum air temperature at 2m has been calculated based on the hourly 2m air temperature data. Monthly total precipitation values are given as monthly sums. All other parameters are provided as monthly averages. ERA5 data is available from 1940 to three months from real-time, the version in the EE Data Catalog is available from 1979. More information and more ERA5 atmospheric parameters can be found at the Copernicus Climate Data Store. Provider's Note: Monthly aggregates have been calculated based on the ERA5 hourly values of each parameter.

We apply a research approach that can inform riparian restoration planning by developing products that show recent trends in vegetation conditions identifying areas potentially more at risk for degradation and the associated relationship between riparian vegetation dynamics and climate conditions. The full suite of data products and a link to the associated publication addressing this analysis can be found on the Parent data release. To characterize the climate conditions across the study period, we use the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). The SPEI is a water balance index which includes both precipitation and evapotranspiration in its calculation. Conditions from the prior n months, generally ranging from 1 to 60, are compared to the same respective period over the prior years to identify the index value (Vicente-Serrano et al., 2010). Values generally range from -3 to 3, where values less than 0 suggest drought conditions while values greater than 0 suggest wetter than normal conditions. For this study, we are using the 12-month, or 1-year, SPEI to compare annual conditions within the larger Upper Gila River watershed. The SPEI data was extracted into a CSV spreadsheet using data from the Gridded Surface Meteorological (GRIDMET) dataset, which provides a spatially explicit SPEI product in Google Earth Engine (GEE) at a 5-day interval and a spatial resolution of 4-km (Abatzoglou, 2013). In GEE, we quantify overall mean values of SPEI across each 5-day period for the watershed from January 1980 to December 2021. Using R software, we reduced the 5-day values to represent monthly mean values and constrained the analysis to water year 1980 (i.e., October 1980) through water year 2021 (i.e., October 2021). Using the monthly timeseries, we completed the breakpoint analysis in R to identify breaks within the SPEI time series. The algorithm identifies a seasonal pattern within the timeseries. When the seasonal pattern deviates, a breakpoint is then detected. These breaks can be used to pinpoint unique climate periods in the time series. This is a Child Item for the Parent data release, Mapping Riparian Vegetation Response to Climate Change on the San Carlos Apache Reservation and Upper Gila River Watershed to Inform Restoration Priorities: 1935 to Present - Database of Trends in Vegetation Properties and Climate Adaptation Variables. The spreadsheet attached to this Child Item consists of 5 columns, including the (i) month from January 1985 through October 2021, (ii) the 1-year SPEI monthly time series, (iii) the dates identified as breaks within the breakpoint algorithm, (iv) the breakpoint trend identified within the breakpoint algorithm, and (v) the dates that were used as the climate period breaks in this study. The climate periods identified in this spreadsheet using the SPEI data were used as the climate periods in our riparian study.

Snow, ice, and permafrost constitute ‘frozen commons,’ or common-pool resources that are collectively used and managed. This study examines the state and uses of snow and ice commons in two remote communities: Bayanzürkh in Khövsgöl Aimag, Mongolia, and McGrath, Alaska. Regional climate analyses indicate air temperatures warmed more than 2.2°C in both locales since the mid-twentieth century, compounding their similar accessibility challenges and dependence on natural resources. Warming affects transit timing and duration over snow and ice, impacting Mongolian herding and Alaskan subsistence hunting. Snow cover duration in both communities was calculated by classifying MODIS Snow Cover imagery utilizing the Google Earth Engine JavaScript API. Annual lake and river ice breakup timing and safe travel days were quantified from winter MODIS imagery from 2002 to 2023 for Lake Khövsgöl in Mongolia and the Kuskokwim River near McGrath, Alaska. Snow and ice duration did not significantly change over the 21 years examined. Relatively high map accuracies allowed discussion of interannual variability impacts on subsistence, transportation, and tourism. Daily snow and ice mapping in Google Earth Engine is a cost-effective and rapid method for quantifying environmental change impacting frozen commons, and therefore a tool for community decision-making and communication.

The following document outlines a generalized procedure to upload as well as maintain the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) as well as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment - Follow On (GRACE-FO) data into the Google Earth Engine (GEE). Google Earth Engine is a geospatial visualization platform that allows scientists to directly interact with various satellite data such as MODIS, LANDSAT, and Sentinel data.

Machine learning algorithms have been widely adopted in the monitoring ecosystem. British Columbia suffers from grassland degradation but the province does not have an accurate spatial database for effective grassland management. Moreover, computational power and storage space remain two of the limiting factors in developing the database. In this study, we leverage supervised machine learning algorithms using the Google Earth Engine to better annual grassland inventory through an automated process. The pilot study was conducted over the Rocky Mountain district. We compared two different classification algorithms: the Random forest, and the Support vector machine. Training data was sampled through stratified and grided sampling. 19 predictor variables were chosen from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imageries and relevant topological derivatives, spectral indices, and textural indices using a wrapper-based feature selection method. The resultant map was post-processed to remove land features that were confounded with grasslands. Random forest was chosen as the prototype because the algorithm predicted features relevant to the project’s scope at relatively higher accuracy (67% - 86%) than its counterparts (50% - 76%). The prototype was good at delineating the boundaries between treed and non-treed areas and ferreting out opened patches among closed forests. These opened patches are usually disregarded by the VRI but they are deemed essential to grassland stewardship and wildlife ecologists. The prototype demonstrated the feasibility of automating grassland delineation by a Random forest classifier using the Google Earth Engine. Furthermore, grassland stewards can use the product to identify monitoring and restoration areas strategically in the future.

The dataset has a spatial resolution of 30 m. It is in a GeoTIFF format and has three bands named "plantyear" ,"startyear" and "species", which describe the planting years and the species of trees, and the year in which Landsat TM, ETM+ and OLI data began to accumulate. The "startyear" band should be used as the Quality Assessment (QA) band for this dataset because the supplementary value from 1982 to the start year may contain erroneous LandTrendr estimates of planting years.The values of the three bands range from 1981 to 2019, 0 to 2020 and 1 to 190, respectively. For the "plantyear" band, a value of 1981 means the planting year was before 1982, and values from 1982 to 2019 correspond to the planting years. A value of 0 in the "startyear" band indicates that no Landsat data from June to September was obtained for the pixel during the period 1982–2020. Values from 1 to 1981 are not present and values 1982–2020 show the year when Landsat data started to accumulate. Values 1–190 in the "species" band represent tree species provided by the SDPT.

These data accompany the 2018 manuscript published in PLOS One titled "Mapping the yearly extent of surface coal mining in Central Appalachia using Landsat and Google Earth Engine". In this manuscript, researchers used the Google Earth Engine platform and freely-accessible Landsat imagery to create a yearly dataset (1985 through 2015) of surface coal mining in the Appalachian region of the United States of America. This specific dataset is an Esri shapefile of the study area.

A European Local Climate Zone map at a 100 m spatial resolution, derived from multiple earth observation datasets and expert LCZ class labels. There are 10 urban LCZ types, each associated with a set of relevant variables such that the map represent a valuable database of urban properties.