Climate Engine

Climate Engine is a free cloud-computing tool for analysing decades of satellite and climate data without downloading and processing whole data archives locally. It is a collaborative initiative of researchers at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and the University of California, Merced, supported by Google. It was started through the White House Climate Data Initiative and a Google Faculty Research Award and officially released in April 2016.

Running on Google Earth Engine, it brings together 90+ satellite- and climate-based datasets, including Landsat 5/7/8/9, Sentinel-2, Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2, MODIS, VIIRS, Sentinel-5P and GRACE-based drought indicators, alongside gridded climate data such as ERA5, gridMET and PRISM. Users compute vegetation and drought indices, anomalies, percentiles and trends on demand for any area, in three ways: a no-code web app (maps as GeoTIFF, time series as CSV or XLSX), a REST API with Swagger and Python notebook tutorials, and a Reports site that publishes Drought, Site Characterization and Vegetation Production reports for Bureau of Land Management (BLM) offices and grazing allotments.

NOAA's National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) uses the API to deliver drought data on Drought.gov, and the BLM, US Forest Service, USGS and Navajo Nation are named partners. DRI reported more than 12,000 registered users in 2023, the year it received an inaugural Google Geo for Good Impact Award for the work. Default API quotas can be lifted by connecting a user's own Google Earth Engine project.