Global warming is adding deforestation around the world. Google is helping today on the monitoring front by combining satellite imagery from Google Earth with heavy computational analysis in the cloud.At the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Google demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth’s forests.

Studying satellite imagery can identify where deforestation is occurring, but serious analysis requires a lot of computational power to compare images over time and locate illegal deforestation activity before it is too late to do anything about it.

Google hopes hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world’s rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide.

Satellite imagery data can provide the foundation for measurement and monitoring of the world’s forests. For example, in Google Earth today, you can fly to Rondonia, Brazil and easily observe the advancement of deforestation over time, from 1975 to 2001.

Landsat images courtesy USGS

This type of imagery data — past, present and future — is available all over the globe. Even so, while today you can view deforestation in Google Earth, until now there hasn’t been a way to measure it.

Using our cloud-based computing power, we can reduce that time to seconds. Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening.

Ease of use and lower costs: An online platform that offers easy access to data, scientific algorithms and computation horsepower from any web browser can dramatically lower the cost and complexity for tropical nations to monitor their forests.

As a Google.org product, this technology will be provided to the world as a not-for-profit service. This technology prototype is currently available to a small set of partners for testing purposes — it’s not yet available to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year.