Best of Google Earth

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.

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 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.

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

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.