Processing imagery with Earth Engine

To produce this new imagery, we used the same publicly available Earth Engine APIs that scientists use to do things like track global tree cover, loss, and gain predict Malaria outbreaks ; and map global surface water over a 30 year period

Like our previous mosaic, we mined data from nearly a petabyte of Landsat imagery — that’s more than 700 trillion individual pixels — to choose the best cloud-free pixels. To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 7,000 times more pixels than the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, or 70 times more pixels than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe.