Google Helps Battle Deforestation With The Cloud

le global warming would be to curb deforestation around the world. Google is helping today on the monitoring fron t by combining satellite imagery from Google Earth with heavy computational analysis in the cloud. Studying satellite imagery can identify where deforestation is occurring, but serious analysis requires a lot of computational power to compare images over time and locate illegal deforestation activity before it is too late to do anything about it. The image above, for instance, shows deforestation in Rondonia, Brazil over the last two decades, with recent activity in red. The red spots in the image below show deforestation hot spots in the past 30 days. Google is working in collaboration with scientists who have created software to analyze deforestation activity as seen through satellite imagery. But the desktop computers these scientists typically use can take days to run each analysis. By moving that to more powerful computers in the cloud, Google can reduce that time to seconds while also making available literally petabytes of raw satellite imagery data.