My Google Map Blog

As far as we are aware there have been no imagery updates in September. The most recent imagery currently available in historical imagery is dated 18th August. We have been waiting for coverage of this year’s Burning Man. We believe DigitalGlobe did capture imagery of it but it is not yet in Google Earth.

Google has continued to release 3D imagery and we apologize for being behind with our KML of 3D areas. It is notable that a significant proportion of 3D updates are updated areas rather than entirely new areas. It is time Google started providing dates with the imagery and possibly a ‘historical 3D imagery’ option.

Street View was added to Kenyan parks and the Philippines, and there were also additions in Argentina and Indonesia.

We had a look at the California wild fires using Landsat imagery. Thank you to GEB reader Christiaan Adams for letting us know in the comments about some false colour Digital Globe imagery available via this KML file from Google Crisis Response. Also thank you to GEB reader Robert Tissell for pointing us to other fire detection resources based on VIIRS data, including this website.

We had a look at a way to find recent imagery using the Google Earth plugin. We mapped out the imagery newer than July 1st, 2015 and classified it by imagery supplier. See the results with this KML file. We also had a look at some interesting sights we found in the imagery while classifying it. Thank you to GEB reader Raul for providing some interesting information in the comments about the demolished houses we found.

We noticed that the country of Moldova has different overview imagery from the rest of the globe. Thank you to GEB reader ‘S. H.’ for letting us know that the change was made circa August 19th, 2015. We still do not know why the change was made.
 
 

We experimented with using Google Earth Pro’s bulk geocoding feature for geocoding regions such as suburbs, cities and countries. Although it is clearly a useful feature and is fairly easy to use, there is room for improvement. A feature we would really like to see is a geocoder that can return the outline of an area rather than a simple placemark. If any of our readers knows of any such geocoding service, please let us know.

We had a look at an image released by the European Space Agency showing the surface deformation from the Chile Earthquake.
 
 
 
 

We have just started a series of posts (Part 1: Data Collection, Part 2: Overview ), having a look at the data we can get from the Google Maps API Maximum Zoom Imagery Service. We will continue to look at the data in October.

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