[UPDATE 2:30PM ET: Spot Image has released a press release about their multi-year agreement with Google to provide new imagery such as the new data described below.]
Google has updated imagery for Belgium, France, Portugal, and France to use CNES/Spot Image satellite imagery at 2.5 meter resolution imagery instead of the old Terrametrics/NASA 15 meter resolution base imagery. So, in other words the low resolution areas are 6X better resolution. Stefan Geens at OgleEarth got the details from Spot Image:
It covers France, Spain, Portugal and Belgium. It is made of imagery from our SPOT5 satellite : 2.5m in resolution. The images are selected from our existing catalog (most recent and cloudfree). They are then combined to make one single uniform image. To cover France, we need roughly 500 SPOT5 images which are of course taken at various date, sunlight, angles, etc…
Stefan also says some new high resolution DigitalGlobe strips are in Belgium. I am quickly researching to see if other areas have been updated in high resolution. Please drop a comment here if you find new imagery.
By the way, this is the first Spot Image satellite imagery in GE I’ve seen. It’s interesting to see Google is expanding it’s source of imagery data to another commercial satellite provider. A few days ago DigitalGlobe‘s newly acquired GlobeXplorer announced it was selling data to Microsoft. And now this happens. Probably just a coincidence, since I’m sure it took more than a few days to implement this imagery.