It’s a view of Mother Earth as we’ve never seen her, and it just might help us solve some our most existential issues. Google has launched a new AI model called AlphaEarth Foundations, which can take images and measurements from satellites and other sources to create current and accurate digital representations of lands and waters.
With all this data, scientists and researchers can monitor problems like water scarcity, deforestation and crop health.
Google says AlphaEarth’s AI modeling has already been helpful. “Our partners are already seeing significant benefits, using the data to better classify unmapped ecosystems, understand agricultural and environmental changes, and greatly increase the accuracy and speed of their mapping work,” the Google DeepMind blog said Wednesday.
Satellites deliver a treasure trove of data every day, but all this information varies in its modalities — such as satellite, radar, simulations and laser mapping — and how current it is. AlphaEarth can integrate all that data and “weaves all this information together to analyze the world’s land and coastal waters in sharp, 10×10 meter squares.”
AlphaEarth also creates summaries for each of these squares that “require 16 times less storage space than those produced by other AI systems that we tested and dramatically reduces the cost of planetary-scale analysis,” Google said. Scientists “no longer have to rely on a single satellite passing overhead.”
