italy

More Italian earthquakes and the Google Earth earthquake layer not updating

November 2, 2016

Italy has again suffered a series of earthquakes, with the largest occurring this past Sunday, October 30th, 2016. The earthquakes were centred just north west of the locations of the August earthquakes. However, if you enable the Google Earth ‘Gallery->Earthquakes’ layer, there is no trace of either of these events. The earthquakes layer has always been restricted to large earthquakes, but the Sunday earthquakes at a preliminary magnitude 6.6s was the largest in Italy in 36 years. We also had a look for the Japanese Kumamoto Earthquake form April and that too is not in the layer, so it would appear the layer has not been updated for some time.

When layers like this are broken, Google should consider either fixing the layer, or, as they did with the weather layers, remove the layer altogethers so as to not cause confusion.

The data for the layer comes from the USGSs which provides KMLs of earthquake data which you can find here. Those KMLs are kept up to date and do show the recent Italian quakes, although a layer called ‘tectonic plates’ that is in the KMLs does not work.

Use the KMLs provided directly by the USGS to find earthquakes in Google Earth and not the built in layer.

Note that if you choose one of the animated KMLs, you must click the play button on the time toolbar in order to see the earthquake markers. You may also want to slightly separate the two sliders a in the time toolbar for the best results.

We have not yet found any imagery for these latest earthquakes available for Google Earth. However, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service does provide imagery in the form of downloadable images of the main affected areas. The images vary in quality and are mostly marked with damage assessments, so it is difficult to see the actual damage in the imagery. In addition, much of the imagery was captured and analysed before Sunday’s earthquake, which was the largest.

Italy’s earthquake

September 7, 2016

As of this writing, Google has not updated ‘historical imagery’ for almost three months. Up until mid-June they had been updating it almost weekly. As a result, there have been a lot of events over the past few months that we know were captured by DigitalGlobe but we cannot access the imagery in Google Earth. One such event was the deadly earthquake that struck central Italy on August 24th, 2016.

Google has provided an image of the region from one of Terra Bella’s SkySat satellites. It can be viewed in Google Earth using this KML file. They SkySat satellites are not as high resolution as most Google Earth satellite imagery, but in this case, some of the affected regions in Italy do not have high resolution satellite imagery – all they have is SPOT imagery, which is lower resolution than the SkySat imagery. Despite the relatively low resolution, we can see some of the effects of the earthquake in the imagery.

Before image: CNES/Spot Image. After image: Google / Terra Bella.
Amatrice, Italy. 1: The location of most of the damaged buildings. 2 & 3: Tents set up after the disaster.

We also saw tents in Grisciano in the Terra Bella image.

Also worth looking at is the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. They gathered satellite imagery of the affected region almost immediately after the earthquake and within a day or two had arranged aerial imagery too. The results can be seen on this page. There are maps of the affected towns, including grading the amount of damage down to building level. For example, you can see the map for Amatrice in this PDF.

Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B are radar satellites that are particularly good at detecting changes in terrain. You can see deformation maps in this article that uses images from before and after the event to detect how much the ground had moved after the earthquake.

Google launches Street View in Hungary and Lesotho; expands in Poland and Romania

April 23, 2013

Google has pushed out some significant updates to their Street View imagery today, launching in Hungary and Lesotho and greatly expanding their imagery in Poland and Romania (along with other parts of the world, including France, Italy, Russia, Singapore and Thailand). Thanks to GEB reader ‘Munden’ for being the first to let us know about this update.

Not only have they added all of this imagery, but they’ve added quite a few new places using their trike system, such as Sha Tin Che Kung Temple in Hong Kong.

As always, remember that this imagery can be viewed in Google Maps but can also be viewed directly in Google Earth. Here’s how that works:

You can read more about this update in this post on the Google Lat Long Blog.