My Google Map Blog

Google continued to roll out 3D imagery this month with around 68 new or expanded areas found in March including the addition of a new country, Croatia. We had a closer look at the Niagara Falls imagery and also had some fun with KML areas, showing the rate of progress Google is making with 3D imagery.

Google has continued to push out new satellite and aerial imagery and it published a map for the updates in February. There is also imagery in Google Earth captured in March, as you can see from the comments in that post (thanks to GEB reader ‘AC’ for letting us know). We hope that Google continues to publish monthly maps showing us what has been updated. If you have some particular point of interest you wish to monitor, Google’s Follow Your World app is still functional. It let us know today that Livingstone, Zambia received new imagery, which turns out to be an image from January 27, 2015.

We also learnt this month that Digital Globe is now selling 30 cm imagery to customers. This is especially good news for parts of the globe that do not have aerial imagery, as we can expect, with time, to start seeing higher resolution imagery in Google Earth.

A big story this month is the availability of the Landsat imagery on AWS. We hope to see it being used in more innovative products in the near future.

We had a look at the ‘rainbow effect’ caused by the way satellite cameras work. Thank you to GEB reader Cory for letting us know in the comments about collections, maintained by the official Google Earth Community, of planes in flight seen in Google Earth Imagery. They are divided into two collections: current imagery and historical imagery.

We had a look at Digital Globe’s First Look coverage and used the map to find some interesting sights in Google Earth.

We looked at two NASA maps: Earth City Lights and Blue Marble. We had been wondering what all the lights in the Australian outback were and we have since discovered that they are largely a result of wildfires. The wildfires were not all burning at once. The data was acquired over a number of days in April 2012 and October 2012 and then combined to give the final image.

What was your favourite story this month?

The post The best of Google Earth for March 2015 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.