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The amazing things about Google Earth


australia

Street View goes to Uluru (Ayers Rock)

Google recently posted on their blog an article saying they have recently released Street View of the iconic Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, Australia.

However, on closer inspection it appears they have not released the imagery via the traditional Street View channels – Google Earth and Google Maps – but rather on a platform called ‘Story Spheres’ which integrates Street View-like photospheres with sound clips. The only Street View on Google Maps we could find is dated 2015 and does not appear to include all the locations found on Story Spheres.

We found Story Spheres to be difficult to navigate because it doesn’t include any maps and the panoramas take a long time to load when you navigate between them – even though we have a relatively fast internet connection. Also, on each navigation, it repeats the same audio instructions, which gets tedious fairly quickly.

Although we do think that having audio clips integrated into Street View is a great idea (and Google is almost certainly not the first to implement it), we think it is highly unlikely we will see such a feature integrated into either Google Maps Street View or the new web-based Google Earth any time soon. Allowing the general public to anonymously upload audio clips would create a nightmare for Google should they try to censor the content for appropriateness. So, they would almost certainly be restricted to only allowing a small number of approved content providers. This would mean that there would be a very limited amount of content worldwide and justifying building the feature into Google Maps or Google Earth for a small amount of content would be difficult. Luckily, Google Earth allows for audio in placemarks and tours which means it is technically possible to build something very similar already using a Google Earth tour. What we need is better tools for tour creation to encourage more people to create content.

Although Google has not yet gathered 3D imagery for Uluru, it does have high resolution altitude data and so looks quite impressive in Google Earth.

The 2017 Queensland Floods in Sentinel-2 imagery

In late March, 2017, Tropical Cyclone Debbie crossed the eastern coast of Australia and then moved on to New Zealand. The heavy rainfall resulted in major floods all along its path. The floods were captured in several Sentinel-2 and Landsat images in early April. The best image we could find is a Sentinel-2 image captured on April 8th of the region around Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia.


The city of Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia.Copernicus Sentinel data, 2017.


The region around Rockhampton.Copernicus Sentinel data, 2017.

The imagery was obtained via the archive on Amazon AWS and processed using GeoSage’s Spectral Discovery tool.

As you can see from the measuring stick in this article the recent flood wasn’t the worst on record, but wasn’t far off.

To view the imagery in Google Earth you can download a low resolution version of the whole Sentinel-2 tile and a high resolution version of just the Rockhampton area. We can’t share the full processed image as it is over 350Mb.

New South Wales Globe

We have introduced you to NSW Globe in the past, but it is well worth a revisit.

New South Wales is an Australian state. Its local government has made available, via a Google Earth KML file found on this site, a wealth of information. The most recent addition is property price and sale information for the whole state.


The popup includes links to property sales information from the last five years for the property in question or for the street or suburb.

Most interesting is how all the data is served. We believe that they are using Google Earth Enterprise. Note that the KML file does not open in ‘Places’ but rather in the ‘Layers’ section. We have seen this before with links from the Google Maps Gallery. One of the side effects of this is that you cannot save it for later, so you have to reopen the downloaded KML file every time you want to view the data. It also stops you from downloading all the data locally and sharing it – a form of copy protection.

The imagery loads smoothly as if it is just another Google Earth layer. Also interesting is that it comes with its own terrain model (as a selectable layer) that is slightly different from Google Earth’s built in terrain. From what we could tell by looking around Sydney, Google Earth’s terrain model is higher resolution.

Exploring New South Wales, Australia in Google Earth

The New South Wales (Australia) Government has just released a new product they’re calling the NSW Globe which compiles a ton of information about the state into a single, powerful KML file. The goal of the site, according to NSW minister for finance and services Andrew Constance:

The tool allows users to find out more about their property or local area, and provides access to historical information including aerial photographs of Sydney from the 1940s, as well as flood maps from places like Bourke, Moree and Wagga

Inside the KML file you’ll find the following:

  • Imagery (medium and high resolution aerial, satellite both government and private sourced)
  • Additional imagery (1943 Sydney Historic, Emergency Services)
  • Terrain data (25m DTMS, 5m DTMS, LiDAR and SRTM various locations)
  • Places (e.g. population centre, suburb, other places)
  • Boundaries (e.g. coastline, local government, localities, electoral state and federal)
  • Roads (e.g. arterial road, minor road, other)
  • Rail (e.g. railway line, railway station)
  • Addresses (property and address)
  • Land parcel (e.g. lot and deposited plan, property boundary, labels)

For example, here is a shot of Sydney using the 1943 imagery:

sydney 1943

It’s quite an impressive product and it provides an amazing amount of information about New South Wales. Check it out for yourself at globe.six.nsw.gov.au.

(via TechWorld)