We love Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery for their easy accessibility and global coverage, but they are rather low resolution at 10 m per pixel for Sentinel-2 and 15 m per pixel for Landsat. Commercial satellite imaging company Planet, now covers the globe with greater regularity and higher resolution (typically about 3 m per pixel) and for the US state of California, releases the imagery under creative commons licence within a couple of weeks of capture. We recently came across a large landslide that occurred along the Californian coast in an area known as Big Sur.
We were able to find it in Planet’s tool ‘Planet Explorer’ for browsing their imagery. You need to sign up to view daily imagery, but signup is easy and free.
The Big Sur Landslide as seen in Planet imagery.
Once you have signed up you can try going here to see the location in Planet Explorer. Try comparing before and after images with the built in ‘compare’ feature.
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.