Google Earth Engine for Water Resources Management (Online)

Spatial Thoughts is offering a course introducing the Google Earth Engine platform for researchers in the water resource sector, academicians, water managers, and stakeholders. The course will teach participants how to build water-related applications for state and country-wide analysis, mapping, and monitoring. It is a 3-week program with adequate time and personal attention given to all participants to allow each one to learn GEE and strengthen programming skills to solve a wide range of problems.

Prerequisite: Basic Understanding of Remote Sensing Concepts. No programming knowledge is required.

The course shall be held as a live online interactive class offered in six sessions of four hours each over three weeks. Participants are expected to attend all six sessions and complete all exercises to earn the employer verifiable course completion certificate. 

Saturday, 03 September, 2022: 3pm-7pm IST (4 hours) - Check Local time

Sunday, 04 September, 2022: 3pm-7pm IST (4 hours) - Check Local time

Saturday, 10 September, 2022: 3pm-7pm IST (4 hours) - Check Local time

Sunday, 11 September, 2022: 3pm-7pm IST (4 hours) - Check Local time

Saturday, 17 September, 2022: 3pm-7pm IST (4 hours) - Check Local time

Sunday, 18 September, 2022: 3pm-7pm IST (4 hours) - Check Local time

Course Outline:

Session 1: Google Earth Engine Fundamentals (Live Session, 4-hours)

• Introduction to the Code Editor
• Fundamentals of JavaScript programming
• Working with Image Collections
• Working with Feature Collections
• Creating Mosaics and Composites
• Calculating Indices (NDVI, MNDWI, AWEI)
• Computation on Images (Simple Thresholding, Raster Algebra)
• Exporting Raster Data

Session 2: Surface Water Mapping (Live Session, 4-hours)

• Introduction to Water Detection Techniques
•     Simple Threshold
•     Dynamic Threshold using Otsu’s method
•     Unsupervised Clustering
• Introduction to the Global Surface Water (GSW) dataset
• Extracting Seasonal and Permanent Water bodies
• Image Processing (Kernels, Convolutions, and Morphological Operations)
• Image Masking
• Raster to Vector Conversion
• Exporting Vector

Session 3: Precipitation Time Series Analysis (Live Session, 4-hours)

• Introduction to Gridded Precipitation and Climate Datasets
• Map/Reduce Programming Concepts
• Calculating Total Rainfall in a Region
• Creating Time-series Charts
• Exporting a Time-series of Rainfall in a Region
• Calculating Long-Term Monthly Average Rainfall
• Trend Analysis

Session 4: Land Use Land Cover Mapping (Live Session, 4-hours)

• Introduction to Machine Learning and Supervised Classification
• Land cover classification
• Accuracy Assessment
• Hyperparameter Tuning

Session 5: Flood Mapping (Live Session, 4-hours)

• Introduction to Radar Remote Sensing
• Visualizing SAR Imagery
• Change Detection Methods for Detecting Floods
• Rapid Flood Mapping using UN-SPIDER methodology

Session 6: Drought Mapping & Creating Earth Engine Apps (Live Session, 4-hours)

• Introduction to Drought Mapping and Monitoring
• Calculating Vegetation Condition Index (VCI)
• Introduction to the User Interface (UI) API
• Building your First GEE App
• Publishing the GEE App on Google Cloud

Assignments (Self-study, 2-hours)

• Assignment 1: Extracting Water bodies in a Watershed
• Assignment 2: Time Series Analysis of Evapotranspiration

Learn more about the course, including reviews, and full course materials on the Course Homepage.

What Do Participants Say?

• "Amazing course! Excellent and detailed examples and lots of additional information. I gained knowledge and useful skills for my work and research. The instructors were always willing to answer every question and solve our problems. It’s a highly recommended course." -Evita Koltsida, National Technical University of Athens, Greece.
• "It’s been a while that I know Ujaval’s work and free tutorials. When I finally got a opportunity to buy the Google Earth Engine for Water Resources Management Course, I got surprised with several things, such as the explanations (Ujaval and Santhosh are very clear and always willing to help) and the powerfulness of the platform. Now I feel that I can develop new products back in my researches and jobs, leading to a better observation of water resources and generating more insights with a huge variety of data." -Rodrigo Brust, MDGeo, Brazil
• "Loved the sessions. The whole course was very well laid out and detailed. Even though I had a very less experience in this domain, I could grasp a good amount to knowledge delivered. Really appreciate the help and the Q&A sessions." -Shreyansh Vishwakarma, IGIDR Mumbai, India

Certification: 

Upon successful completion of all the live online sessions and completing the class project, participants will be issued an employer-verifiable certificate from Spatial Thoughts. Learn more.

About the Instructor:

Ujaval Gandhi is the founder of Spatial Thoughts. He has 15+ years of industry experience and is a world-renowned GIS expert. He previously worked at Google and led the Google Earth Outreach team in India, training over 1000 researchers, scientists, and engineers to use Google Earth Engine. During his career, he has trained researchers and practitioners in the water sector from the World Bank National Hydrology Project (NHP), Advanced Center for Integrated Water Resources Management (ACIWRM), International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and more.

See the full profile at https://spatialthoughts.com/about

Logistics

• Participants will use their laptop/desktop for the class.
• The course will be conducted over Zoom. Meeting ID and password will be shared by email 1 day before the event.

Refund policy:

• You can cancel your registration up to 7-days before the class and get a full refund.
• For last-minute cancellations, we will try our best to accommodate you to a future batch of this course without an additional charge.
• In the unlikely event that we need to cancel or move the training to a different date, you will be provided a 100% refund.

Student discounts and scholarships are available. See eligibility criteria and application process.