In my lab there is a masters student working on monitoring deforestation for palm fields in Indonesia using Google Earth Engine, which is similar to Earth on AWS. There is a whole scientific field devoted to analysing this kind of data: remote sensing. It's underrated in the hacker community honestly.

Geo as a whole in my observation. There are decades of research effort that have got us to where we are now, well developed study programmes worldwide, advanced proprietary and open software and data available, and geo is effectively mainstream in google maps and sat nav. Yet for some reason this contextual background is missed by many, and so I see commenters making statements about what a leap forward this or that is, when in fact it's just part of an evolving history. I'm not criticising people for not knowing what they don't know - my question is - why does it seem like geo as a whole has trouble communicating this context? I wonder whether there are any other areas of tech that suffer from this lack of awareness?

That sounds really interesting. Does your colleague blog — or are there remote sensing tech blogs to follow?

Various financial analysis' such as counting the number of cars in retailers parking lots, looking for crop shortages among commodity traders, estimating damage from natural disasters to estimate insurance company's exposure.

I'm sure there's also more altruistic uses, such as providing better forcasting and advise for farmers in developing countries.

Disaster response is one of the altruistic cases. You can use deep learning to measure impact of hurricanes and better allocate resources

But this data can be months or years old, doesn't seem like this would have much value to financial analysts.

It depends on the revisit time, spatial resolution, region of interest, cloud coverage and product type. For example Landsat 8 images the entire Earth every 16 days, Sentinel-2 revisit time is ~5 days with 2 satellites and MODIS provides daily data but at moderate spatial resolution (> 250m). We expect both the spatial resolution and revisit time to improve as more companies are launching satellite constellations.

I did not appreciate that fact. Thanks

A friend of mine is using geospatial data to look for places in Mozambique with high probability of finding hominid fossils. He's basically automating Lee Rogers Berger's work of travelling Africa and looking for caves and other spots. It's pretty cool but still very preliminary.