Sorry for the add-on, but the direct link to the Nature paper mentioned is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature20584.html .

      Joel Kovarsky

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From today's NYTs: <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/09/science/mapping-three-decades-of-global-water-change.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience>

The concluding paragraph:

" The project’s scope, as described in a paper published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, included the entire archive of three Landsat satellites from 1984 to 2015 — about three million high-resolution images, or nearly two quadrillion bytes (1.8 petabytes) of data. The images were processed in the cloud by 10,000 computers using Google’s Earth Engine platform, classifying each 100-foot by 100-foot pixel as water or land."

          Joel Kovarsky