Scaling up in Earth Engine

Commonly, when Earth Engine users move from tutorials to developing their own processing scripts, they encounter the dreaded error messages, “computation timed out” or “user memory limit exceeded”. Computational resources are never unlimited, and the team at Earth Engine has designed a robust system with built-in checks to ensure that server capacity is available to everyone. This chapter will introduce general tips for creating efficient Earth Engine workflows that accomplish users’ ambitious research objectives within the constraints of the Earth Engine ecosystem. We use two example case studies: (1) extracting a daily climate time series for many locations across two decades and (2) generating a regional, cloud-free median composite from Sentinel-2 imagery.