Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google, and this week it has blogged about its shiny new tool at the COP 16 climate conference in Cancun. It is a database that will help scientists and conservationists track and analyse changes in Earth's environment, and hopefully slow deforestation as well as any new forestation projects going on around the globe.

The satellite imagery tool, called Google Earth Engine, takes advantage of Google's large-scale "cloud" computing infrastructure to build a powerful database out of the thousands of satellite photographs from the past 25 years, many of which have never been analyzed. It will be available online for use by scientists, independent researchers and nations.

Google generously plans on "donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform," This is done to aid the effort to combat global warming by slowing deforestation. It is also designed to help countries around the globe to have better visibility on their own forestation or deforestation activities.

The Washington Post quoted, director of the Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Doug Boucher as saying the global trend in deforestation "is one of the few bright spots amid the otherwise gloomy news as far as climate change is concerned." Brazil, for one, has slowed its deforestation to a 22-year low.

This new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data - current and historical will enable global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment." Google is also "donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities."

This technology will give data on locations and extent of global forests, detecting how our forests are changing over time, directing resources for disaster response or water resource mapping. In the past what was not properly researched was the success of the new Forestation projects in areas of the world that were previously naturally barren. However, small these projects may be in comparison to the large scale deforestation, but they should feature in any statistical data that is to measure the overall global deforestation.

There are large barren areas around the globe that with little effort can provide good basis for Industrial Plantations. However, there is evidence that Reforestation Projects Capture More Carbon than Industrial Plantations. Now with comparing new data and comparing it with older data, one can see large scale reforestation projects and measure its success or failure.

The main challenge facing academics has been how to cope with the huge scale of satellite imagery archived data, and the massive computational resources required for their analysis. Therefore, many of these images have never been seen or analysed. However, now we would be able to able to build applications to mine valuable data on Google Earth Engine, providing several advantages. This plan with the Donation of 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform," to aid the effort to combat global warming by slowing deforestation is very commendable.

Have a look at WashingtonPost gallery for some images For example see the example of Monitoring changes in Caspian See here:

Landsat satellite data, acquired and processed by the U.S. Geological Survey and drawn from the 38+ year archive, are being used to monitor changes to a major Caspian Sea bay. The Kara-Bogaz-Gol basin on the eastern edge of the sea undergoes periodic, dramatic change in the water level. Because the basin is significantly more shallow than other near shoreline areas, the changes are more visible and affecting.

Human intervention by damming the feeder inlets has, in recent times, increased the magnitudes of change and impacted the salinity and water chemistry. In March 1980, the barrier to the Caspian was blocked. Accelerated evaporation caused a fall in the Caspian Sea water level, and the resulting "salt bowl" caused widespread problems of blowing salt, reportedly poisoning the soil and causing health problems for people hundreds of kilometers downwind to the east. In 1984 the Kara-Bogaz-Gol basin was completely dry.

In 1992, the Caspian Sea levels were rising again after the barrier was breached, and Kara-Bogaz-Gol Bay filled up again. Levels have been fairly stable the past decade
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