Google Earth Engine (GEE) is both a data catalog and a computing platform, and that combination is what makes it transformative. Most data sources on this page require you to download files, manage storage, and run processing locally — GEE eliminates all of that by colocating petabytes of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with Google's cloud infrastructure.
The same analysis script that processes a single Landsat scene over a small study area can scale to the entire global archive without code changes, making planetary-scale time-series analysis, land cover classification, and change detection feasible from a browser or Python notebook.
For GIS professionals, GEE often functions as the processing engine that sits upstream of visualization and sharing tools. You run your analysis in Earth Engine — compositing imagery, computing indices, classifying land cover, training models — and export the results as GeoTIFFs or vectors that feed into Atlas, QGIS, or web applications.
The catalog itself is also valuable as a discovery mechanism: many of the datasets listed elsewhere on this page (Sentinel, Landsat, MODIS, ERA5, WorldClim, Dynamic World, ESA WorldCover) are available through GEE's indexed archive, meaning you can query, filter, and combine them programmatically without visiting multiple portals or managing file downloads.
