Fun with KML areas

Last week we released a KML showing the cities covered by the new type of 3D that Google has been producing.

We thought it would be interesting to see how much area has been covered.

Tokyo, Japan, has the largest single area of 3D in Google Earth

Google Earth, does not have any built in feature to allow you to work out the area enclosed by a polygon. Google Earth Pro does have this feature, but only displays it for the selected polygon, so recording each of the 487 areas we have found so far would be quite tedious. Luckily, we found a helpful site, Zonum Solutions, which was able to take our KML file, and produce a list of areas. We compared the results of one or two of the areas with Google Earth Pro’s answers and found slight discrepancies. For the purposes of this post it doesn’t really matter, but if you use the above website for anything more serious it might be worth investigating which is the most accurate. We then got the country areas and US state areas from Wikipedia.

Interesting facts:

• Tokyo, Japan, has the largest single area of 3D Imagery.
• Vatican City has 100% coverage due to it being a very small country contained inside the 3D area around Rome.
• The US has nearly three quarters of all the worlds 3D imagery.
• California has the most 3D imagery of any US state.
• Alaska is the only US state with no 3D imagery.
• Africa and continental Asia, have no 3D imagery.
• So far, approximately 0.06% of the Earths land area has 3D imagery.

Notes on the data below:

Some of the recent additions by readers of GEB are not included.
The fact that many of the areas include water, including parts of sea, was ignored. The country and state areas quoted are for land and water bodies within the country.
Areas that cross country borders or state borders, was not dealt with, except for two exceptions:

• Vatican City was counted, but its area not subtracted from Italy’s area.
• New Jersey, which shares two large areas with other states which are attributed to those states, was estimated, but not subtracted from those states.

Country 3D Area (sq km) Country Area (sq km) % Covered Argentina 928 2,780,400 0.03% Australia 1,983 7,692,024 0.03% Austria 1,034 83,871 1.23% Belgium 1,068 30,528 3.50% Brazil 1,971 8,515,767 0.02% Bulgaria 652 110,879 0.59% Canada 5,846 9,984,670 0.06% Chile 152 756,102 0.02% Denmark 564 43,094 1.31% Finland 136 338,424 0.04% France 10,976 338,424 3.24% Germany 5,283 357,114 1.48% Greece 118 131,990 0.09% Hungary 1,818 93,028 1.95% Italy 4,351 301,336 1.44% Japan 4,356 377,930 1.15% Luxembourg 108 2,586 4.16% Mexico 3,425 1,964,375 0.17% New Zealand 435 270,467 0.16% Norway 150 323,802 0.05% Portugal 220 92,090 0.24% Romania 719 238,391 0.30% Spain 4,767 505,992 0.94% Sweden 580 450,295 0.13% Switzerland 2,906 41,284 7.04% United Kingdom 2,640 242,900 1.09% United States of America 150,299 9,526,468 1.58% Vatican City 0.4 0.4 100%

US State 3D Area (sq km) State Area (sq km) % Covered Alabama 6,068 135,767 4.5% Arizona 2,964 295,234 1.0% Arkansas 2,714 137,732 2.0% California 18,690 423,967 4.4% Colorado 3,674 269,601 1.4% Connecticut 719 14,357 5.0% Delaware 525 6,446 8.1% Florida 4,910 170,312 2.9% Georgia 7,997 153,910 5.2% Hawaii 107 28,313 0.4% Idaho 1,111 216,443 0.5% Illinois 2,456 149,995 1.6% Indiana 5,988 94,326 6.3% Iowa 1,364 145,746 0.9% Kansas 3,972 213,100 1.9% Kentucky 2,514 104,656 2.4% Louisiana 3,327 135,659 2.5% Maine 1,941 91,633 2.1% Maryland 499 32,131 1.6% Massachusetts 565 27,336 2.1% Michigan 5,840 250,487 2.3% Minnesota 1,326 225,163 0.6% Mississippi 979 125,438 0.8% Missouri 2,814 180,540 1.6% Montana 1,318 380,831 0.3% Nebraska 1,015 200,330 0.5% Nevada 770 286,380 0.3% New Hampshire 1,513 24,214 6.2% New Jersey 917 22,591 4.0% New Mexico 1,427 314,917 0.5% New York 3,871 141,297 2.7% North Carolina 6,353 139,391 4.6% North Dakota 1,104 183,108 0.6% Ohio 4,019 116,098 3.5% Oklahoma 429 181,037 0.2% Oregon 3,268 254,799 1.3% Pennsylvania 2,643 119,280 2.2% Rhode Island 1,160 4,001 29.0% South Carolina 4,961 82,933 6.0% South Dakota 772 199,729 0.4% Tennessee 2,909 109,153 2.7% Texas 8,384 695,662 1.2% Utah 3,508 219,882 1.6% Vermont 254 24,906 1.0% Virginia 5,321 110,787 4.8% Washington 4,130 184,661 2.2% West Virginia 1,508 62,756 2.4% Wisconsin 6,184 169,635 3.6% Wyoming 419 253,335 0.2%