historical imagery

Exploring urban growth in Spain with Google Earth

May 28, 2013

A few weeks ago, we showed you a neat project from Google that shows the human impact in various cities thanks to various ages of imagery for specific locations around the world.

A similar project has been done showing growth in Spain by using Google Earth’s historical imagery feature and some nice design work to let you “slide” from old to new to see the difference. Miguel Alvarez has created the non-profit site NacionRotonda.com, which has a collection of sliders to show the urban sprawl that is raising “awareness of the destruction of the territory”.

Miguel has already created dozens of posts to highlight these changes, with more coming out all the time. He’s using the jQuery Before / After Plugin from CatchMyFame to create the effect, which can be downloaded for free if you’d like to use it in a project.

Be sure to check out his full site at NacionRotonda.com. Great work, Miguel!

Exploring historical imagery with Google Timelapse

May 9, 2013

The historical imagery feature of Google Earth is an amazing tool, allowing you to browse imagery from a handful of different years for any given location on earth. Google has recently been working on a project with the USGS, NASA and TIME called Timelapse, and they’ve released it as a browser-based interactive timeline of imagery for selected locations on earth.

The process for developing this is stunning. From the Google Lat Long Blog:

We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.

They’ve also created a handful of animated GIFs to show some of the timelapses, such as this one that features the Columbia Glacier Retreat from 1984-2011:

Additional animated GIFs can be found on their Google+ page.

You can go check it all out for yourself on the Google Timelapse page, or read more about it on TIME’s website or on the Google Lat Long Blog.

Is historical imagery coming to Street View?

February 29, 2012

I really like the historical imagery feature in Google Earth. It’s a very useful feature that allows you to look at some neat things, and it’s a great way to visit the past in various areas around the world.
As reveled in a thread in the Google Earth Hacks message board by ‘Munden’, there are some signs that perhaps a “historical imagery” view is coming to Google Street View in the future.
He’s found a number of areas that have multiple Street View imagery versions available online, and he cites a handful of examples such as this building that looks like a giant sheep. Here is the old image, here is the new image, and here is what they look like side-by-side:

In his testing, Munden has discovered some interesting things:

In New Zealand, old imagery isn’t the default but isn’t removed anymore. My old links will call up the old low resolution images, even on browsers that have never seen that URL before. I’ve even cleared the caches. Google definitely has the old images in their Street View database. You can switch by dragging the Pegman by a pixel or two and suddenly you’ll be in the new imagery and stay there no matter how much moving around you do.

It’s important to note that once you are viewing an older image if you use the SV in-picture arrows to move through the pictures, you will stay in that older imagery. You have to drag the Pegman to switch to new imagery, as I mentioned previously. This could simply be an artifact of the old URL, and they have no plans to create a history of Street View of course. I find it most interesting that you STAY in the old imagery once you’re viewing it though.

Other examples include a futuro home (old image, new image), or the “Christmas decorations” location that ‘sladys’ found — the new imagery is embedded on the site, but the old imagery can still be found via this URL.
Ultimately, all of this might not mean anything. Google hasn’t made any announcements about anything related to historical Street View imagery and they may have other reasons for keeping the old imagery accessible. In any case, it’s a neat little feature that Munden has uncovered and may be a sign of things to come. Good find, Munden!

8 things to do with Historical Imagery in Google Earth

October 6, 2010

Last week we again showed you how the “Historical Imagery” feature in Google Earth works. It’s quite an amazing feature, with a lot of possible uses. With that in mind, here are 8 things you can do using Google Earth’s Historical Imagery:
• Find clearer images of a place you want to examine closely. Sometimes areas (even in the base imagery) are obscured by clouds, haze, or poor lighting. You can sometimes find a clearer photo for a specific spot using historical imagery. For example, boaters or scuba divers can use historical imagery to find photos which better reveal underwater landscape, or shipwrecks. The lighting and water clarity varies depending on when photos were taken.
• Find a unique shot of an area on a specific date of historical significance. For example, American Samoa was hit by a Tsunami on September 29, 2009. There’s a satellite image of parts of the country (including Pago Pago) where you can see signs of the damage done. Other examples include the massive earthquake in Haiti and the Four Mile Canyon fire in Colorado. Google often acquires its data from satellite companies (like GeoEye or DigitalGlobe) who take images after disasters to help rescue efforts.
• Archaeologists can use historical imagery to find better angles or lighting to reveal subterranean archaeological sites (as was done in France by the armchair archeologist.

• Reveal the devastation of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, as shown in various examples: disappearing forests | hidden logging | climate change tour
• See places further offshore. Google cut the imagery further offshore when they released the new undersea 3D ocean data in GE 5. But, if you turn on historical imagery you can see images that went further out to sea and reveal things like aircraft in flight, boats, ships, whales, and undersea features.

• Use historical imagery to sometimes find different seasonal imagery (winter, fall, etc.)
• See the growing urban sprawl in your area. It can be neat to simply look at your house/neighborhood from years ago to see how it has changed.
• Watch the expansion of a major building. Schools and churches are often good examples of this, as they tend to build new wings and various new buildings over time. For example, flip through the historical imagery of this church

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

to see various buildings added on in the past 17 years.

What are some other fun or interesting uses of the Historical Imagery tool? Leave a comment below and share your ideas.

Google Earth Historical Imagery Update – 16-March-2009

March 16, 2009

Google has released a big update to the historical imagery feature available only through Google Earth 5. The historical imagery contains a massive amount of imagery which surpasses the data you already see when viewing Google Earth satellite and aerial imagery by default. Google has basically been archiving the imagery they used in previous releases of imagery since 2005, plus historical imagery they’ve acquired from many sources for some places going back decades old. It’s hard to express just how big this data really is – we’re talking many, many terabytes (terrabytes?) of data! One terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
When GE 5 was first released, the bulk of the new historical imagery was concentrated on the US. There were places with new historical imagery all over the globe, but it wasn’t pervasive. Now there is even more historical imagery all over the globe. Google mentions a few locations in their LatLong post to check out: watch the construction of the Dubai man-made archipelago known as “The World“, witness the deforestation of the Amazon forests, see what happened to New Orleans when Katrina flooded the city. Unfortunately, they neglected to include a Google Earth file so you could find and see the imagery yourself. So, check out all three of these locations here in a quick tour (you must have GE 5 installed, and turn on “Historical Imagery“).

Amazon deforestation comparison in Google Earth

Deforestation of Amazon

I haven’t been able to determine the full scale of this new update. But, there seems to be many more historical instances between 2000 and the present for rural areas around the globe (mostly strips of satellite photography from DigitalGlobe). Perhaps Google wasn’t finished with processing all of this data before the GE 5 release. But, now its there. If anyone finds other interesting locations with historical imagery, please leave a comment here. Particularly interesting ones I’ll write about in future posts and make tours so others can check them out.

By the way, I also discovered Google added the historical image of the predator drones in Pakistan which Stefan was talking about last month. Visit this location and check out the oldest historical image.