GEE Timeseries Explorer for QGIS – Instant access to petabytes of Earth observation data
Current Earth Observation applications heavily rely on analyses of dense intra-annual or inter-annual time series. State-of-the-art analysis workflows thus require mass processing of satellite data, with data volumes easily exceeding several terabytes, even for relatively small areas of interest. Cloud processing platforms such as Google EarthEngine (GEE) leverage accessibility to satellite image archives and facilitate time series analysis workflows. Instant visualization of time series data, though, is currently not implemented or requires coding customized scripts or applications. We here present the GEE Timeseries Explorer which allows instant access to any Earth Engine image collection from within QGIS. It seamlessly integrates the QGIS UI with a compact widget for visualizing time series from any GEE image collection graphically as an interactive plot, or spatially as images with customized band rendering.