Use of the Climate Engine and Google Earth Engine tools at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and NIDIS/Drought.gov

NOAA has partnered with the Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC), the Desert Research Institute (DRI), UC Merced and Google to develop Climate Engine, a cloud computing web application in which programmers and non-programmers alike can quickly and easily process and visualize satellite and climate data in an interactive User Interface (UI) and Application Programming Interface (API). Data storage, access, and on-demand processing and storage is accomplished using the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and the massively parallel cloud computing platform Google Earth Engine. Common climatic operations, along with multiple modern drought indices, have been written using the Google Earth Engine python API and made available in the Climate Engine UI and REST API.

NCEI is operating two instances of the Climate Engine API, both running within the Google Cloud as part of the NOAA-Google Cloud Project (GCP) contract. Drought.gov is using the API to create hundreds of standardized drought indices and anomaly products from multiple foundational temperature and precipitation datasets. The NCEI Industry Proving Ground team has utilized the Climate Engine API to create products supporting the next version of the NCEI Climate Atlas and various Climate Monitoring products, along with numerous products in support of the retail, architecture and engineering and reinsurance/finance industry sectors. Both projects update the data daily and the data are available in both GeoTIFF and web-map-ready XYZ tile formats.