My Google Map Blog

In June, Malta became the latest country to receive Street View. South Korea also got a significant increase in Street View coverage.

There was an imagery update in early June and we had a look at a number of new sights:
Mudslide in Argentina and Oroville Dam in California.
The Bidi Bidi refugee settlement in Uganda.
Floods in the Dominican Republic, Malaysia, and San Jose, California and a factory fire in the Philippines.

Google has not updated the ‘historical imagery’ layer recently so there are probably many other sights that didn’t make it into the default layer that we will only get to see on the next update to ‘historical imagery’.

Google has continued to ensure that the Voyager tours in the new browser based Google Earth remain fresh by adding a number of educational tours, a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Harry Potter books, and a Beatle Mania tour in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ eighth album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

We had a look at a collapsed bridge in Atlanta, Georgia and discussed the fact that Google Earth and Street View are becoming very useful tools for investigating such events.

We had a look at floating solar plants around the world. They still make up only a tiny proportion of solar generation, but the number is growing fast and we expect it to be a popular option in countries where land is at a premium.

We had a look at ‘fairy circles’ in South Africa. They cover a vast area across the Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces. We believe they are created by termite or ant colonies.

When Google Earth doesn’t have imagery of large scale events, we look to other sources. We used Sentinel-2 imagery to explore a landslide and tsunami in Greenland, and flooding along the Black River, Arkansas. We used imagery from imaging company Planet to look at a landslide in California

We created a basic tool for two way conversion between KML and Microsoft Excel.

The Environmental Defence Fund (EDF) website released the results of pollution measurements being made by Google’s Street View fleet.

The post The best of Google Earth for June 2017 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

We saw a lot of imagery of flooding this month, including:
* The ongoing flooding in Sri Lanka.
* Flooding in Peru, New Zealand and Madagascar.
* Another look at the Peru floods.
* Flooding in Queensland, Australia.

Using Sentinel-2 imagery we saw two large tornado tracks crossing Canton, Texas.

We had a look at a crack slowly forming in Larsen C ice shelf, Antarctica. When it eventually breaks off, the iceberg created will be about 5000 square kilometres and will be among the largest icebergs ever recorded.

We had a look at a number of landslides in Kyrgyzstan, a country which seems to be particularly prone to landslides.

We did a series of posts looking at satellite and aerial imagery calibration targets around the world. Some were quite difficult to find, but in the end we had quite a large collection.

We enjoyed Google’s April Fool’s joke – a fake data centre on Mars. We also managed to find Mars rover Curiosity’s tracks in Google Maps, and by downloading the full image, were able to find Curiosity herself.

We had a look at some strange patterns and other sights around Jiayuguan, China.

We had a look at how DigitalGlobe managed to transfer its vast archive of imagery (100 petabytes) to the cloud.

DigitalGlobe released imagery of the Mocoa Landslide in Colombia. We also had a look at a remarkably similar event, the Armero Tragedy, that occurred in 1984.

The post The best of Google Earth for May 2017 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The big news in April was the release of a new version of Google Earth. It is browser based, and currently only available in Google Chrome and as an Android App. At the current point in time it is missing some major features, including ‘historical imagery’ and the ability to create content. But, we must realise that it is still in development and Google has indicated that those features and more will be coming.

We had a look at how to embed the new Google Earth in a web page and what the various parameters in the URL mean. We also demonstrated some ideas for getting some unusual views by manipulating the parameters.

Josh of GE Teach released a tool for creating tours in the the new Google Earth.

Guatemala is the latest country to receive Street View. Also of note is this post by Google about Street View releases in California, featuring some of the tallest trees in the world.

We had a look at some mysterious marks in the Arizona desert that turn out to be calibration targets for the Corona spy missions.

We had a look at the amazing colour changes that can be seen in Sentinel-2 imagery of California due to the unusually spectacular blooms of flowers following a long drought.

We created a JavaScript tool that helps you to estimate the time of day an image was captured using shadows to work out the angle of the sun. As a bonus, it can also tell you the approximate height of the objects casting shadows.

We revisited a couple of places, including the islands that China is building in the South China Sea and the ongoing war in Yemen.

We released part 4 of our ‘Tour Builder’ series. We added a feature for creating tours that follow a predefined path.

We had a look at some mysterious dots found in satellite imagery of the Amazon.

The post The best of Google Earth for April 2017 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

3D Imagery
A large batch of 3D imagery was added to Google Earth around March 21st. We had a look at a 3D image of Trumps aircraft spotted in Florida.

Street View
Street View was added to Tunisia and a Vunuatuan Volcano.

Imagery Updates
We had a look at a number of events captured in Google Earth imagery, including:
* A tailings dam collapse in China
* The Gatlinburg, Tennessee Wildfire
* A collaped bridge in India
* Landslides in Kyrgyzstan
* The Australian Open and the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
* A plane crash, a derailed train and a fireworks explosion

We had a look at the enormous volume (petabytes) of imagery being produced by the various imagery providers. Adding to the growth of the imagery, ESA’s Sentinel-2B satellite was successfully launched on March 7th. To help make sense of it all, satellite imaging company Planet released a new version of their Explorer tool, which now includes an ‘historical imagery’ feature. Also, Decartes Labs released an imagery search engine capable of finding imagery using pattern matching.

Google Earth Tour Builder
We have started a series developing a Tour Builder for Google Earth:
Part 1: Circling
Part 2: Arcs
Part 3: Labelling

Canals
We had a look at a number of different canal systems:
A water transfer canal project in Brazil
The Suez Canal expansion project
The Panama Canal expansion project

The post The best of Google Earth for March 2017 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

February saw two new countries, Ghana and Senegal, added to Street View.

A lot of new imagery was added to ‘historical imagery’ and we had a look at some of the landslides caused by the Kaikora Earthquake and wildfires in Chile. We also took another look at the extent of the Chile wildfires using Landsat and Sentinel imagery. Earlier in the month we had a look at imagery relating to cyclone NADA-16, that struck the east coast of India, imagery relating to an earthquake in Indonesia and imagery relating to the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race.

We had a look at animations of a few open pit mines around the world.

We had a look at how DigitalGlobe is helping to combat slavery with the use of high resolution satellite imagery of fishing ships, which helps investigators analyse their behaviour and identify individual ships.

Satellite imaging company Planet set several new records, including largest number of satellites launched simultaneously and largest satellite fleet. In addition, the sale of Google’s Terra Bella to Planet was announced.

Google released some DigitalGlobe imagery of the Oroville Dam crisis.

Google Earth VR won a Lumiere award – the Century Award for VR in service of environmental enrichment.

We had a look at a message in protest of a planned high speed rail link in the UK.

We had a look at some ancient earthworks in the Amazon.

Google updated the search results box in Google Earth which fixed some long outstanding bugs.

Coming up in March:
Google announced that it will be open sourcing Google Earth Enterprise in March.
ESA will be launching imaging satellite Sentinel-2B – currently scheduled for March 6/7.

The post The best of Google Earth for February 2017 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The big Google Earth news this month was a relatively minor update to the client. But its release does indicate continued interest by Google in the Google Earth product. After several years of very minor bug fixes, this update actually had a minor new feature as well as updating the interface components.

On a less positive note, the radar layer stopped working and Google decided to remove it, leaving the cloud layer as the only remaining ‘weather’ layer.

We had a look at a Chinese nuclear submarine in the Karachi port in Pakistan and a nearby scrapped oil tanker that exploded in an unrelated incident.

We had a look at “The Floating Piers” on Lake Iseo, Italy and “The Gates” in Central Park, New York by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

We created a JavaScript tool for easily splitting Polygons or Paths. If you would like to see other similar utilities for manipulating KML, do let us know in the comments.

We talked about a setting in Google Earth that causes it to notify you when it encounters errors in KML. This is useful if you are a developer that produces KML.

We had a look at a nice Easter Egg in the latest version of Google Earth. We incorrectly stated that it was the first such Easter Egg in Google Earth. Apparently the Google Earth Flight Simulator was first introduced as an Easter Egg.

We created a JavaScript tool that takes a KML file and exports all its placemarks to .csv format which can then be imported into Excel or other products.

Google open-sourced a new compression library for 3D graphics and we speculated about whether or not it will be used in Google Earth and Google Maps to improve performance.

We had a look at what DigitalGlobe is doing with artificial intelligence to analyse satellite imagery.

We made our 2017 wish list for Google Earth and received a lot of extra wishes from GEB readers in the comments.

We released maps of the imagery updates of 2016 showing approximate locations of all imagery found in the ‘historical imagery layers’ for each month of 2016.

We made a number of observations about the 2016 imagery update maps.

We discussed the possible sale of Terra Bella, formerly Skybox Imaging, to Planet. More recent sources suggest the sale is in its advanced stages.

On January 14th, SpaceX had its first launch since the launchpad explosion one of its rockets suffered last September. In anticipation of this, we had a look at a number of SpaceX related sights in Google Earth. The launch was successful, as was the return of the first stage of the rocket, which landed on SpaceX drone ship ‘Just Read the Instructions’. See the full launch here. Fast-forward to the 27 minute mark to see the spectacular landing.

We had a look at a 3D building that appears to have been captured at multiple times and the imagery combined, so we can see it in different stages of construction.

We had a look at a river in Russia that turned a striking red colour due to pollution.

We had a look at a problem with the recently added global mosaics of Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery that were added to historical imagery. The worst aspect of the problem – the mosaics not fading out when you zoom in – appears to have since been fixed.

Google updated the historical imagery layer in late December and we did a number of posts looking at various sights in the imagery.
We had a look at:

• The Italian earthquakes, the Burning Man festival and a Train crash in Texas.
• The Calais Jungle migrant camp in France, which has since been closed, and flooding in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Japan.
• Several wildfires in the US, flooding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a tornado in Kokomo, Indiana.

The post The best of Google Earth for January 2017 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

We noted that the ‘historical imagery’ layer has finally been updated and had a look at some wildfires in the US.

We had a look at the most significant changes to Google Earth during 2016. Thank you to GEB reader Bhaskar Phukan for pointing out that we missed mentioning that Google Map Maker is being merged with Google Maps and will be shut down in March 2017. It isn’t technically a part of Google Earth, but a lot of the map data in Google Earth came to it via Google Map Maker.

We had a look at the extent of new Street View coverage added during the course of 2016. We also had a look at the progress made during 2016 in new 3D imagery coverage.

We talked about why Santa’s base remains a secret and discussed the various reasons why Google Earth imagery in the polar regions is so poor.

We had a look at satellite imaging company Planet’s new natural disaster response imagery platform.

We had a look at a study using Sentinel 1 data to measure the sinking of the Millennium Tower, San Francisco.

We ran the Google Earth Blog Santa Tracker.

We had a look at ‘Land Lines’ a Chrome experiment that has fun with a selection of Google Earth imagery.

Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands got Street View.

We had a look at a sunken island caused by bad altitude data in Google Earth.

Google announced that the Google Earth API / plugin will finally be shut down on January 11th, 2017.

We had a look at a global historical water surface changes map created using Landsat imagery and Google Earth Engine.

We had a look at a burnt out plane at Dubai International Airport and also noted some imagery errors. The imagery errors have since been rectified.

We had a look at the very first imagery from DigitalGlobe’s new satellite World View-4.

We had a look at desert sand being blown by the wind as seen in Landsat imagery.

We got a scare when the Panoramio photos stopped showing properly in Google Earth. We thought that Panoramio, which is scheduled to be shut down in November 2017 had been shut down early. But it turned out to be a temporary technical glitch which was quickly resolved.

We had a look at a river in India whose course is changing significantly over time and villagers are complaining that they are losing land to residents on the other side of the river.

Last month Google added some global mosaics of Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery to ‘historical imagery’, one for each year from 1984 to 2016. We created tools to animate the mosaics or switch between 1984 and 2016.

The post The best of Google Earth for December 2016 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

The biggest Google Earth news this month was the release of new global mosaics of Landsat/Sentinel 2 data from 1985 to date, and the release of Google Earth VR edition.

Speed in milliseconds per image:

The growth of Lusaka, Zambia, over 30 years (1985-2016) using the new Google Earth global mosaics.

We had a look at the artwork of Italian artist Dario Gambarin in the fields near the Italian town of Castagnaro.

We had a look at the island of Ta’u that has recently installed a solar system from Tesla, including solar panels and large batteries. We also had a look at a number of other islands using renewable energy.

Google released Edition 3 of the Voyager layers featuring the story of Saroo Brierley, who found his way home with the help of Google Earth. We have received number of complaints from GEB readers that it is not obvious how to get rid of the popup that is enabled by default. The solution is to deselect the Voyager layer.

We had a look at how to enable 3D buildings in the flight simulator in Google Earth Pro, where, unlike the standard version, the 3D buildings are turned off by default.

We used Sentinel 2 imagery to have a look at the large number of landslides near Kaikoura, New Zealand following a large earthquake in the region.

We had a look at a tool created by GEB reader Michael Lee for putting photos in Google Earth. It differs from a similar tool we created in that ours creates photo overlays, whereas Micheal’s creates icons with the image in the popup.

We had a look at Dolores, Uruguay and the damage caused by a tornado that struck it in April 2016.

We had a look at several lightning strikes maps available for Google Earth.

We had a look at various sights in Google Earth imagery, including an explosion at the Puma Energy plant in Nicaragua, the North Korean floods of August, 2016, a folk village that has been removed in North Korea, and the June 2016 Gay Pride Parade in New York.

The countries of Albania and Montenegro got Street View.

Google announced that it is merging Google Map Maker into Google Maps. We have noticed recently that they have stopped showing postcode boundaries in Google Maps. We don’t know if this is related to the change.

We started a series on animating in Google Earth. So far we have covered: The pros and cons of different types of animation How to import models The time toolbar Stay tuned for more posts in the series.

We had a look at tornado tracks that we have been able to identify in Google Earth imagery.

We had a look at the Google Earth built-in ‘Earthquakes’ layer and noted that it is not updating. We recommend using the USGS provided KML files instead.

We had a look at some residents of Mars as part of a series we started in October.

The post The best of Google Earth for November 2016 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

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.

Although Google has been adding new imagery to Google Earth, they have not been updating historical imagery since June, so we cannot make a map of the latest imagery. We did, however, look at a few locations this month which have recent imagery, including the damage caused by the Erskine Fire in California and the trail of destruction left by the Jiangsu Tornado in China. We also discussed an image of Itu Aba Island in the South China Sea that Taiwan apparently wants censored.

Google added quite a lot of interesting 3D imagery this month, including two new countries, Malaysia and Tunisia. The imagery of Tunis has since been removed but that is probably only temporary. The imagery of Sfax, Tunisia remains and a second location, Ipoh, has been added in Malaysia. The city of Kumamoto of Japan was also updated with 3D imagery captured after the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake and we had a look at the signs of earthquake damage, most notably a lot of blue tarpaulins used to patch the roofs. Last month marked the 100th anniversary of the US National Parks Service and in honour of the occasion Google released 3D imagery of a number of US Parks. We created some Google Earth tours showing off the imagery. We also had a look at some volcanoes as featured in 3D imagery, including Mount Fuji in Japan, Mount Vesuvius in Italy and Mount Saint Helens in the USA.

DigitalGlobe’s latest satellite WorldView-4 was supposed to be launched this month. However, the launch was postponed till October. Terra Bella successfully launched several new SkySat satellites in a joint launch with Peruvian earth observation satellite PerúSAT-1.
 
 

We had a look at a number of interesting rotating islands around the world prompted by a story about one found in Argentina. If you haven’t already, be sure to also check out some further examples from the Google Earth Community.
 
 

We had a look at some circular geoglyphs that were recently studied in Peru.
 
 
 
 

We discussed two issues with modern facial recognition technology. Google’s automatic facial recognition as used in Street View often blurs objects that should not be blurred, including a cow. At the same time, a recent study suggests that blurring imagery does not fool facial recognition software.
 
 

A partnership between Google, Oceana and SkyTruth released a program called Global Fishing Watch that monitors fishing activity around the world.
 
 
 

We released a KML file that catalogues ships that appear in Google Earth’s 3D imagery. The focus is on cruise ships, but ferries and a few other classes of ship are included as well.
 
 
 
 

We discussed the difficulty of trying to gather good satellite imagery in locations that have year round cloud cover.
 
 
 
 

We had a look at a study of land lost vs land gained done using Google Earth Engine.
 
 
 
 

In memory of 9/11 we created an animation using Street View imagery showing the new World Trade Center buildings.
 
 
 
 

We had a look at some weird altitude effects related to 3D imagery and Google Earth tours.
 
 
 
 

We had a look at imagery from Terra Bella of the damage caused by an earthquake in Italy and also looked at the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, which also gathered imagery of the event.
 
 
 

We had a look at declassified imagery from US spy satellites and were impressed by the resolution, although it is not quite as good as what is currently available in Google Earth.
 
 
 

We updated our contour drawing script to use Mapzen image tiles rather than their API and found that it works much faster, which allows for much higher resolution contours.
 
 
 

Google released a bug fix update to Google Earth which resolves many of the installation issues as well as fixing an annoying crash when moving placemarks around.

The post The best of Google Earth for September 2016 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.