Time-Lapse Animation using Google Earth Engine

Introduction

A small step towards my self-learning goals for the year 2022, my first article on this platform, and very excited to share my experience while working on a mini project in the area of Remote sensing and Earth Observation. But before we dive in, a quick introduction about me and my academic and professional background.

An Earth Observation enthusiast with an interest in nature photography, I would choose a quiet walk in nature any day over a lazy Sunday afternoon watching Netflix. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I get to experience the rich biodiversity and “Sunny” weather throughout the year.

A Remote Sensing Professional with a specialization in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing. A recent Ph.D. graduate from University College Cork, Ireland, my thesis focused on monitoring disturbances in forests of Ireland using SAR remote sensing technology. Along with SAR data, I have had the opportunity to work with optical remote sensing data for crop and forest monitoring applications.

A characteristic of remote sensing data is its large volume. The “Big Data” processing requires the use of high-performance computing resources. This Project was undertaken with limited computing resources i.e. my laptop (i7 DELL with 16 GB RAM and 64-bit operating system). Downloading the satellite-based remote sensing data would take a couple of hours and processing of these images on my laptop meant long nights for my machine. This motivated me…