When working on Remote Sensing applications, many operations require calculating area. For example, one needs to calculate area covered by each class after supervised classification or find out how much area within a region is affected after a disaster. Calculating area for rasters and vectors is a straightforward operation in most software packages, but it is done in a slightly different way in Google Earth Engine – which can be confusing to beginners. In this post I will outline methods of calculating areas for both vectors as well as images. We will cover the following topics, starting from simple to complex.
- Area Calculation for Features i.e. vector data
- Area Calculation for Images (Single Class)
- Area Calculation for Images by Class
- Area Calculation for Images by Class by Region
- Area Calculation for Images by Class by Region by Year