historical imagery

Historical imagery and Ukraine

June 27, 2016

As we have mentioned in the past Google Earth does not have any imagery of Ukraine since June 2015, which puts it on the list of censored countries that includes Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. However, a recent report on the citizen journalism site Bellingcat states that Google recently added some historical imagery from July 17, 2014, the day of the downing of Flight MH17. In fact they even know the exact time the image was captured: 11:08am (local time). Google Earth does not show the time that imagery was captured but the reporters at Bellingcat know exactly which DigitalGlobe image was used, and DigitalGlobe does know the exact time that a given image was captured.

If they are correct that the image was only recently added to Google Earth, this would suggest that whatever mechanism has been used to censor the country does not extend to historical imagery from 2014. Also of note is the fact that the Ukraine received Street View in October 2015 although it doesn’t appear to have been updated since then. The most recent Street View we could find was dated July 2015. There is no Street View in most of the eastern parts of the country and Crimea. There is some Street View of Donetsk, but that is dated 2011.

As you can see below, the new sighting of the BUK that is believed to have been used to shoot down Flight MH17 isn’t very significant, as it just adds an extra point to the fairly well documented route of the vehicle that day as identified by Bellingcat from various sources.

The green pin shows the new sighting.

To see the above locations in Google Earth download this KML file Note that the truck carrying the BUK can not be seen in the imagery in most of the locations marked, but rather it is known to have been at those locations at those times because of various photos / videos of it. See this Bellingcat report for the sources of the locations.

At one point Russia released a fake photo supposedly showing a fighter jet shooting down flight MH17.

Tips for creating historical imagery animations

June 9, 2016

This post is some tips for creating historical imagery animations using the ‘Historical Imagery Tour Maker’ we released in yesterday’s post.

Tilt

The Google Earth plugin, like the default setting in Google Earth, tilts the view towards the horizontal as you zoom in close to the ground. In Google Earth you can stop that behaviour in “Tools -> Options -> Navigation -> Navigation”. For the plugin, there is no access to the settings, so, if you want your animation to be from directly overhead, be sure to press ‘u’ on your keyboard to reset the tilt after you have zoomed in to your area of interest. For a list of other Google Earth keyboard shortcuts see this website

Cache the imagery

If you do not have very fast internet, set the ‘step’ to several seconds and click ‘play’ and allow it to cycle through all the imagery in order to cache the imagery before you begin. In addition, when creating your final tour, you can create two versions, one with a long ‘step’ to be run first to pre-cache the imagery, then another to play it at the desired speed.

Maximum speed

If you use a step less than about 750 milliseconds, then Google Earth cannot keep up and will not show all the historical imagery when playing the tour. We are not sure whether this varies depending on your computer’s speed.

Recording Video

We have found that the built-in recording functionality (Tools->Movie Maker) of Google Earth Pro works rather well. However, it removes the historical imagery time bar and the status bar, so you cannot see the dates in the resulting footage. We used the highest quality settings and 10 frames per second. One nice feature of the Movie Maker is that it waits for imagery to load.

Before you start recording, make sure the tour is not set to auto repeat or the recording never stops.

Screen recording software can also be used. Use F11 to go full screen then hide the side bar and tool bar. We don’t know of a way to hide the menu.

Here are a couple of tours we have created:

Get the Google Earth tour here

Advanced Historical Imagery Tour Maker with the Google Earth API

June 8, 2016

There are several different ways to automate animated historical imagery that we have explored in the past.

The first, and easiest, is to use a Google Earth Tour that simply changes the date by a given increment at a set frequency. So you could, for example, change the date by one month every second. In this post we presented some JavaScript to help with creating such tours. The main disadvantage of this technique is that Google Earth’s historical imagery is not regular and so you end up with periods of no imagery changes, and some skipped images. The technique does have the advantage of accurately representing the passage of time.

The second technique is to obtain the list of imagery dates using the Google Earth API and then use a tour to change the date, showing each existing image at a given frequency. This results in an animation that shows all the images in a given time range. We presented a tool for doing this in this post.

An outstanding problem that occurs with both techniques, is that Google Earth imagery is often not the best quality so you get an animation that includes some images with excessive cloud cover or updates that only cover part of the area of interest and do not look good. In addition, if you are trying to show change over time, you may not want images that are too close together in time if no significant differences can be seen between them. When we manually create animations for the blog we choose each image to include.

Some time ago we created a tool for creating Google Earth Tours that include or exclude images of your choice. We created it at the time the Google Earth API was expected to be shut down, so we chose not to share it. However, Google has so far kindly kept the Google Earth API alive, so we think people may find it useful.

It requires a browser that supports the Google Earth API, which, as far as we know is only Firefox. So, you will need to open this post in Firefox, and click ‘Activate Google Earth’ and then ‘Allow and Remember’ in the popup.

Instructions

To begin, zoom in to the location where you want to create the animation. Then click ‘Get dates’. The tool will obtain the list of dates available for that location. Note that for locations with a large number of images, this may take a bit of time.

For most animations, you will want to start the animation at a specific point in time. Go to the date you wish to start at in the Google Earth plugin, then click ‘Set first date’. This will exclude all dates before this date.

Now go through each image deciding whether to include it in your animation or not. You can either select images with the plugin or use the ‘Next’ button to cycle through images. If you definitely want an image, click ‘Include date’, if you definitely do not want an image, click ‘Exclude date’. The tool has two modes. You can choose to select specific dates to include in your animation, or select specific dates to exclude. If you are only removing a few images, then the latter mode is easier.

Once you have gone through the imagery you can see how it will look by clicking the ‘Play’ button. If you are satisfied with the results, set speed of the animation by adjusting ‘Step’ which is the time between frames, then click ‘Download Tour’. You can now open the downloaded file in Google Earth and play the tour.

(warning! clears included and excluded lists)

loop. Step (milliseconds):

Use ‘includes’ only
Use ‘includes’ and ‘dates available’

Included dates	Dates available	Excluded dates

Interesting imagery from 2015 that we missed

January 11, 2016

Last week we looked at the Bento Rodrigues mine disaster. Today we are looking at a number of other sights to be seen in the satellite imagery from 2015. We found most of the locations with the help of DigitalGlobe’s First Look map.

Tropical Cyclone Chapala struck Yemen on November 3rd, 2015. Google Earth has some images from a couple of weeks later, which show a number of bridges and roads washed away.

A washed out bridge in Yemen.

Tocopilla, Chile experienced landslides and flooding in August, 2015. The imagery is not very good quality but we were able to find the location below where some houses have been washed away.

The Copiapo River in Atacama, Chile, flooded in March. As you can see in this article it was more mud than water.

The slightly darker browns indicate the extent of the flooding.

Two volcanoes erupted in Chile: Villarrica (seen below) erupted on March 3rd, 2015 and Calbuco on April 22, 2015. Calbuco has a black and white image in Google Earth showing a plume of smoke from its summit

Villarrica before and after the eruption.

Be sure to download this KML file and explore the above sights in Google Earth, as well as a number of others including:

A chemical spill in the Animas River from the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado.
Chambers Bay Golf Course while the US Open for 2015 was in progress (not a lot can be seen).
Some flooded houses in South Carolina from the flooding that occurred in October.
The 2015 Dubai Air Show.
An oil spill from an attack on an oil field in Libya in February.

Satellite imagery updates for 2015

January 1, 2016

For the first half of 2015, as it has in the past, Google released imagery update maps showing outlines of newly updated imagery. However, in June, it released the Voyager layers, which include a ‘satellite imagery updates’ layer. We believe the change was made due to the deprecation of Google Maps Engine, which is what was formerly used to publish imagery update maps. However, the Voyager layer has only been updated once since June, so we have mostly been relying on the Google Earth API to find imagery updates. See here for our imagery update posts of 2015.

We have used the Google Earth API to create an approximate map of the areas in Google Earth that currently have imagery dated 2015.

To see the above map in Google Earth download this KML file.

The USA, parts of Europe, and Japan got quite a lot of aerial imagery. Most of the rest of the world got satellite imagery concentrated on areas with high population. Interestingly, the southern and eastern countries of Asia got remarkably good coverage.

Also of note, is that Syria and the Ukraine seem to have been added to the list of countries with blanket censorship. There were no satellite imagery updates with imagery dated 2015 in Syria, the Ukraine, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Both Syria and the Ukraine did receive imagery during 2015 but it was dated 2014. It is not Google carrying out the censorship but has most likely been done by buying rights to the imagery from the satellite imagery providers. The censorship in Ukraine was implemented long after the conflict there started and we have seen imagery taken after flight MH17 was shot down over the Ukraine. The most recent imagery appears to be from November 2014. At the same time, the Ukraine got Street View in October 2015, so although it is censored from above much of it is now more visible from ground level.

It must be noted that Google has not yet added any December imagery, and in general Google’s imagery updates often include imagery of various ages, so the amount of imagery dated 2015 will increase with time.