Google Earth Gets an AI Chatbot to Help Chart the Climate Crisis

"Google has come up with a way to better map Earth's disasters, predict them, and be able to track which communities and ecosystems are going to be wrought by their destruction. If you want to find out what's straining the environment in your neck of the woods, all you have to do is ask. Google Earth AI, a fusion of Google's Earth and Gemini AI systems, was introduced in July. Part of that effort is an AI model called AlphaEarth Foundations, which turns terabytes of satellite data into useful data layers tracking the history of what happens across the surface of the planet."

"The combined system lets users parse historical landscape data that can reveal great shifts in the climate over the years. For example, users can look at rising water levels in flood zones, chart changes in surface temperatures across regions of the planet, or see the effects of clean air policies by studying changes in air pollution. Now, Google has revealed new capabilities coming to its Earth AI platform. Users can now interact with the AI model by asking it questions like you would with a chatbot. An example Google gave was asking Earth AI to "find algae blooms" to help monitor water supplies. The system will search satellite images and its troves of collected data to give a list of results."

Google introduced Google Earth AI by combining its Earth platform with Gemini AI and deploying AlphaEarth Foundations to translate terabytes of satellite imagery into layered datasets. AlphaEarth Foundations creates data layers that track historical changes across Earth's surface, enabling analysis of flood zone water levels, regional surface temperature shifts, and air pollution changes from policy actions. The platform supports natural-language queries so users can ask the AI to locate features, such as algae blooms, across satellite imagery and compiled datasets. Results return lists of detected instances, which can support disaster mapping, prediction, and monitoring of affected communities and ecosystems.

Read at WIRED