Credits : ESA
This Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) composite image shows the Bay of Naples off the west coast of Italy.
The bay is lined to the south by the Sorrento Peninsula – where the world-famous Amalfi coast runs along its southern edge.
Just beyond the tip of the peninsula lies the beautiful island of Capri.
The islands of Ischia, renowned for its thermal springs, and Procida can be seen to the top of the bay.
Mount Vesuvius is featured just inland from the bay overlooking the city of Naples.
Google is working with the Group on Earth Observations , which is an international consortium of the world’s space agencies (NASA, JAXA in Japan, ESA in Europe, INPE in Brazil, and many others).
The Google Earth Engine is a repository that brings together public Earth observation data (satellite imagery, terrain datasets -also bathymetry ?-, climate information) into a large georeferenced data repository.
It is expected that ultimately the Earth Engine will comprise many petabytes.
The goal is not only to provide public access to Earth observation data, but also to provide an application programming interface (API) to encourage developers outside of Google to develop applications that use the data in the repository.
The Google Earth Engine will provide easy access to the data and a high performance computational platform for geoprocessing.