US: ClimateEngine.org unveiled at White House Water Summit

The research team behind ClimateEngine.org unveiled their commitment to expanding the web application's unique role in helping the nation address water issues during the White House Water Summit held in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the United Nations World Water Day. The Summit is focused on raising awareness of water issues and potential solutions in the United States, and to catalyze ideas and actions to help build a sustainable and secure water future through innovative science and technology.

The Desert Research Institute and University of Idaho, in partnership with Google, have developed ClimateEngine.org – a web application that enables users to quickly process and visualize satellite earth observations and gridded weather data for environmental monitoring and to improve early warning of drought, wildfire, and crop-failure risk.

ClimateEngine.org uses Google’s Earth Engine cloud computing and environmental monitoring platform that allows for on-demand processing of global satellite, climate, and weather data via a desktop or smartphone web-browser. Utilizing access to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of cloud storage and 50 million donated hours of computing time on Google’s Earth Engine environmental cloud computing platform, the web-based application is able to mine, process and analyze a 30-year archive of high resolution optical and thermal images taken of Earth by the Landsat satellites – “in a matter of seconds, compared to hours and even days with traditional computing systems," says Charles Morton, Desert Research Institute remote sensing scientist.

As part of the White House Water Summit, the Desert Research Institute and University of Idaho committed to expanding ClimateEngine.org to include new drought and water demand monitoring metrics and over 30,000 place-based averaging domains relevant for federal and local agency rangeland, agricultural, and water resource management in the Western US.

Internationally, the ClimateEngine.org team is working with the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) to develop fast and versatile methods for monitoring agricultural drought over broad areas at risk of food insecurity. The partnership between the Desert Research Institute, University of Idaho, FEWS NET and Google was also started through the 2014 White House Climate Data Initiative and a Google Faculty Research award.

For more information:
www.ClimateEngine.org