Earth Blox Partners with Google Developing New Software To Access Satellite Data

In partnership with Google, in a widely attender Google Earth Outreach webinar, Earth Blox demonstrated its ability to provide near-instantaneous cloud powered access and analysis of satellite imagery in a no-code user interface (UI), opening access to Earth observation (EO) data to non-experts of every sector like never before.

Launched in 2019, Earth Blox seeks to make “EO data accessible to all those that work, live and breathe sustainability”, said CEO Genevieve Patenaude. This ambition is in good shape as the company secured a partnership with Planet in early 2022, adding high-quality, daily refresh to its available data sets. Earth Blox has shattered multiple barriers to entry for new users by removing the need for expensive software, lengthy training, as well as the download and processing times for the petabytes of data involved in EO. Building on the ubiquity of global cloud services, Earth Blox makes EO data accessible from the web browser of any tablet or laptop.

The web-based software is designed to help customers make better, faster decisions in critical situations with bespoke analysis and action-oriented information visualisation. Earth Blox’s simple yet powerful toolkit empowers users with no coding experience to meet their informational needs, using a drag-and-drop system of re-arrangeable, pre-programmed commands, represented as blocks, to design workflows with specific data sets, analyses and output visualisation parameters. This unique blend of customizability and ease of use is unprecedented in the downstream EO market thanks to Earth Blox’s elegant solution.

Professor Iain Woodhouse, co-founder of Earth Blox, illustrated to attendees the prodigious value of the service to help over 130 UN country teams with humanitarian and environmental missions. STRATA is an Earth Blox powered tool built for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh. Earth Blox’s STRATA uses Climate and Environmental Hazards, Peace and Security and Socio-Economic Exposure as indicators, assigning values to each and flagging them when they cross a set threshold. Earth Blox’s visual programming environment allows on-site teams to adjust the data input into the platform to reflect the particularities of their region or local situation to identify “hot spots” in a map and identify the most at-risk areas.

This new model of EO delivered in a software as a service (SaaS) package breaks the mold of traditional satellite data users and presents groundbreaking opportunities for organisations worldwide to easily track and act on their environmental and sustainability performance as well as that of their suppliers against their own performance indicators. The visual programming environment allows new users to quickly familiarise themselves with satellite imagery to leverage a custom workflow, helping them identify priority areas for high-impact resource deployment in humanitarian and environmental projects.