Mickey Mellen

The best of Google Earth for July, 2014

August 1, 2014

We saw some great new Google Earth-related stories in July, and here are some of my favorites.

We took a closer look behind Google’s annual Santa Tracker.

With the death of Louis Zamperini, we showed you a full timeline of events from his life.

We looked at some of the differences between Google Earth and Google Maps.

We found ways to explore earthquake fault lines using Google Earth.

We took a look at the great new 3d imagery in London.

We showed you some ways that people are using Google Earth to learn more about what happened with Flight MH17.

On the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, we showed you some excellent visualizations from Erik Hellstedt.

We showed you how DigitalGlobe is helping to track forest fires in southeast Asia.

What was your favorite story from July?

About Mickey Mellen

Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.

DigitalGlobe helping to track forest fires

July 31, 2014

DigitalGlobe is one of the leading providers of satellite imagery for Google Earth, and now they’re teaming up with the World Resources Institute to track fires across southeast Asia via their new Global Forest Watch Fires system.

From an article by Yuchen Wu in the Boulder County Business Report:

Nigel Sizer, global director of the World Resource Institute’s Forests Program, said, “With DigitalGlobe’s imagery, you can see down to the individual tree level and even identify species. DigitalGlobe imagery is processed as color-infrared, enabling WRI to quickly distinguish between healthy and dead vegetation, draw burn area boundaries, and detect burn scars in order to assign accountability to the fires.”

It’s a great way to use DigitalGlobe’s impressive ability to capture imagery to make a difference in the world.

About Mickey Mellen

Using Street View cars to check for gas leaks

July 30, 2014

Most of you have heard about Google’s issues with Street View card and wi-fi sniffing. Regardless your thoughts on that, you’re bound to appreciate what the cars are now able to sniff: gas leaks.

According to an article by Trevor Mogg on Digital Trends, Google is beginning to test out cars that include methane sensors to check for gas leaks.

From the article:

The initiative turned up “thousands” of leaks from utility pipes beneath the streets, providing officials with data on pollution “that used to be invisible,” EDF’s Fred Krupp wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Fortunately these leaks don’t pose any immediate threat to safety, and the utilities will monitor and deal with the more serious ones. However, EDF noted that such gas “has a powerful effect on the global climate, packing up to 120 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide.”

Here is an early map that has been generated by this new data:

It’s a great idea, and hopefully it will be added to additional cars over time. There’s seemingly quite a few other pieces of data that could be useful to measure when you have an army of GPS-tracked cars driving around; weather data, road quality, etc. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes in the future.

Be sure to check out the full article on the Digital Trends website.

About Mickey Mellen

Using Google Earth to enhance urban agriculture in Rome

July 29, 2014

Urban agriculture can be a great thing, but can be difficult to effectively plan and manage. Flavio Lupia, along with other researchers from the National Institute of Agricultural Economics in Rome have been making great use of digital mapping tools to help research and plan ideal locations around the city.

You can read more about their work in this PDF document, which goes into detail about their work, such as:

The current version of the database contains more than 4,000 polygons spread over a total surface of about 35,000 hectares with a total farmed area of 400 hectares. The geodatabase was realized by interpreting the high resolution images of Google Earth for the year 2007 and 2013 allowing further analysis on the temporal evolution of the phenomenon.

Beyond that, here are some additional thoughts from Flavio:

Despite in Italy there are some private and governamental bodies producing regularly very high resolution aerophotogrammetric scenes the restriction and policy distribution of the data don’t allow researchers to perform this kind of analysis.
Although in Italy, especially during the last year, the concept of open-data is becoming more and more common this is still a theoretical idea since public administrations have releases very few geospatial data.
GE allows to perform the photointerpretation process, the digitalization and the multi-temporal analysis with an easy to use single tool.
The entire mapping project employed only human resources (researcher for the photointerpretation), no costs for tools and images acquisition and pre-processing thanks to GE.
Even if the radiometric and spatial resolution of the GE imagery are lower than those provided by the Italian public bodies, the researchers demonstrated the fitness-for-use of GE for mapping urban agriculture. The images are sufficient to discover cultivated parcels as small as 8 square meters in size and allow to photointerpreters to use all visual element to identify cropping activities (tone, color, texture, pattern, etc.).
Since 2011 GSV report the timestamp in the GE status bar. This helped researchers to have a clear idea about the acquisition time during the “virtual field check”. Nonetheless some limitations in the usability of GSV exist: 1.the temporal mismatch between GE imagery used for parcels identification (year 2013) and GSV (2011-2012). 2.the temporal variation among the single images of GSV, in fact scenes acquired in different times are woven together to form a continuous coverage along the streets (in our study area we found GSV images acquired in 2011 and 2012).

It’s an excellent use of Google Earth, and it should help result in great things for the city of Rome.

About Mickey Mellen

The 100th anniversary of the start of World War I

July 28, 2014

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, and Erik Hellstedt at Geo-Animate.com has built an excellent visualization of the early stages of the war.

In Erik’s words:

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. Within a week, the world’s great powers had mobilized and begun sending their armies to the frontiers. This GE animation begins August 1st and follows the daily movements of each army’s units through October 31st, by which time a near-continuous belt of trenches along this Western Front prevented any significant movement for nearly four years. At the end of this War of Movement animation, there were already millions of war casualties and countless shattered communities.

He’s continuing to develop the project, but what he has completed so far is extraordinary. Check it out for yourself at www.geo-animate.com/War-of-Movement.

Great work, Erik!