IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2022 - 323

which is paramount to certain applications, the datasets
are continuously refreshed.
The Google Earth Engine is a differentiated spatial data
and analytics platform with a long history in enabling
environmental and social impact. It has three main components:
the data catalog, the computation platform, and
a collaborative ecosystem. The first big scientific breakthrough
was Hansen's global forest cover and change map
in 2013. This involved analyzing almost 700,000 Landsat
images with a million hours of computations simultaneously
on 10,000 computers. This took four days but would
have taken 15 years on a single computer.
The Global Forest Watch platform is also powered by
Earth Engine and is applied successfully to generate alerts.
The Amazon Conservation Association reports that authorities
act within 48 h of a Global Forest Watch deforestation
alert, and, this way, they can promptly stop deforestation
action.
Dr. Moore elaborated on another successful application
for mapping tiger habitats, with the goal of increasing
the global tiger population, built on the Global Forest
Map. Previous analyses took about 1.5 years each, but, with
Google Earth Engine, scientists were able complete them in
less than a week.
Scientists also analyzed Landsat resolution with regard
to the potential to restore forest. An application [7] was
built that is providing high-resolution information on treeplanting
projects.
The biggest analysis using Earth Engine was one of the
European Commission Joint Research Center's projects,
scanning 32 years of history of surface water on Earth and
how it has changed. Without Earth Engine, it could have
taken 1,200 years of computation. Instead, more than three
million Landsat images were run on 66,000 computers,
producing results in a matter of days. This led to a collaboration
with the Joint Research Center and UN Environment
to jointly build a freshwater monitoring app [8]. Until that
time, more than 80% of the UN member states did not have
the capacity to report water statistics. Now, more than 150
member states are using the data.
OpenET [9] is another fruitful cooperation among the
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) [10], NASA, and the
Desert Research Institute (DRI) [11] to map and measure
evapotranspiration (ET), essential to water-scarce regions.
This brought together six different scientific organizations,
each with its own ET methodology. Now, with OpenET,
these scientists can compare their work.
More than 10,000 scientific papers and more than 5,000
apps have been published in which Earth Engine played
a role. From the beginning, Earth Engine has been completely
free for nonprofit and research use. Now, companies
and governments also want the same access, resulting in a
new enterprise-grade version of Earth Engine. The U.S. Forest
Service was one of the first government users applying
Earth Engine to forest-mapping projects, hence producing
results in just an hour rather than three months.
SEPTEMBER 2022 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE
Mapping is the beginning, but Dr. Moore sees the future
in near-real-time, high-resolution monitoring to support
decision making. One example is wildfire monitoring.
Google Earth receives updates from a NASA satellite every
15 min with thermal pixels, from which Google Earth is
detecting wildfire boundaries, which are sent immediately
into Google Search on Google Maps.
Dr. Moore concluded her speech by introducing Dynamic
World [12], which is a new data product using Earth
Engine. It is a land cover and land use dataset with nine
land cover classes. An AI model has been trained to recognize
these classes, allowing near-real-time land cover classifications
at a very high level.
MAJOR AWARDS CEREMONY
Following the plenary speeches for IGARSS 2022, Prof. Alberto
Moreira, chair of major awards of GRSS, opened the
2022 awards ceremony. As in the past, the opening and
plenary session of IGARSS 2022 was chosen as the venue
for the recognition of GRSS members elevated to the grade
of IEEE Fellow and the recipients of the Society's four major
awards. For each award, 2022 GRSS President Dr. David
Kunkee presented the recognition and congratulated
the awardees.
IEEE FELLOW AWARDS
The grade of IEEE Fellow recognizes unusual distinction
in the profession and is conferred only by invitation of the
IEEE Board of Directors to a person of outstanding and
extraordinary qualifications and experience in designated
fields. The IEEE bylaws limit the number of members who
can be advanced to Fellow in any year to one per mil of
the membership, exclusive of students and affiliates. To
qualify, the candidate must be a Senior Member and be
nominated by an individual familiar with the candidate's
achievements. Endorsements are required from at least five
IEEE Fellows and the IEEE Society best qualified to judge.
The GRSS Fellow Committee completes the first evaluation
of the nominees. After this, the IEEE Fellow committee,
comprising approximately 50 IEEE Fellows, carefully evaluates
all nominations, considering the Society rankings,
and presents a list of recommended candidates to the IEEE
Board of Directors for the final election.
On average, the GRSS performs better than other Societies
with respect to the number of elected Fellows every
year. This year, Dr. Ad Stoffelen from the Royal Netherlands
Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, The Netherlands, received
the Fellow Award effective 1 January 2022, with the citation,
" For contributions to satellite wind measurement missions "
(Figure 10).
Dr. Stoffelen received his M.Sc. degree in physics from
the Technical University of Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The
Netherlands, in 1987, and his Ph.D. degree in meteorology
with topic scatterometry from the University of Utrecht,
Utrecht, The Netherlands, in 1998. He currently leads a
group on active satellite sensing at the Royal Netherlands
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IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2022

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