Archive for October 31st, 2016
Peeping out of the dungeon
by sashafromdonetsk on Oct.31, 2016, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA
The best of Google Earth for October 2016
by Timothy Whitehead on Oct.31, 2016, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA
The two biggest stories for this month were Hurricane Matthew (which caused major storm damage and flooding through the Caribbean and then up the east coast of the US), and an attempted landing on Mars.
There are two sets of post-Hurricane Matthews imagery available. The first set comes from Google Crisis Response and consists of satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe and Terra Bella of the Caribbean and the east coast of the US. See the imagery in Google Earth with this KML file. The second set of imagery is aerial imagery gathered by NOAA and covers the US east coast immediately after the hurricane and the flooding further inland in the following days. See the imagery in Google Earth with this KML file that we created. We describe how we created the second KML here and here.
The attempted Mars landing was unsuccessful as the lander, named Schiaparelli, crash landed. We had a look at its final resting place as well as various other rovers and landers on Mars. We also had a look at various versions of the track of the rover Curiosity and were also able to find the rover in recent HiRISE imagery.
It is Halloween today so check out Friday’s post to learn how to dress up Google Earth as a pumpkin and find some scary locations in Street View.
We had a look at two very large avalanches in Tibet using Sentinel 2 imagery.
We used Landsat and Sentinel imagery to have a look at some oil and sulphur fires in Iraq that have been started by retreating Islamic State forces.
After our success with getting the post-Hurricane Matthews NOAA imagery into Google Earth we also set up a KML file that displays Mapzen altitude tiles in Google Earth.
We had a look at some images known as ‘Little Planets’ created using Google Earth 3D imagery. The artist since contacted us and gave us two links to more ‘Little Planet’ images he has created. See them here and here.
Google announced that it is shutting down Panoramio. New signups and uploads will be stopped from November 4th, but the service should continue to function until November next year. Users can move their photos to Google Maps if they wish.
We had a look at various floods around the world as seen in Google Earth imagery. We looked at floods in Eastern Sudan, Skopje, Macedonia, Chetwynd, Canada, and Wuhan, China.
We took US tornado data found on Wikipedia and put it in Google Earth. It is an interesting collection, but has not proved useful in finding imagery of tornado tracks as the locations are rather inaccurate.
Google has made available Landsat and Sentinel 2 imagery on Google Cloud. The Landsat collection is much more comprehensive than the equivalent collection on Amazon Web Services. However, Google does not provide thumbnails for the imagery, whereas AWS does.
We had some fun turning the earth inside out by mapping every point to its antipode.
Google announced that it was dropping two of the weather layers from Google Earth.
The post The best of Google Earth for October 2016 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.