philippines

Google Earth Imagery Updates: Flooding and Factory Fire

June 5, 2017

Today we are having a look at three different floods and a factory fire.

Dominican Republic
In late April and early May, the Dominican Republic and neighbouring Haiti experienced heavy rainfall. There is a DigitalGlobe image captured on April 29th showing a region around Santo Domingo, the capital of the Domincan Republic:

Flooding to the north of Santo Domingo.

Malaysia
In January this year Malaysia experienced severe flooding, forcing 23,000 people from their homes. According to Wikipedia severe flooding is a near yearly occurrence in Malaysia. Worst affected were the north-eastern provinces Kelantan and Terengganu. The image below is from Kelantan. It is often hard to tell in rice growing regions what is abnormal flooding and what is deliberately flooded rice fields. In the region pictured, the houses appear to be on higher ground and appear to be mostly dry. We have included an older image for comparison as we initially mistook the local canals for flooded roads.

San Jose, California.
In February, Coyote Creek overflowed in San Jose, California, resulting in evacuations of thousands of people. The image is black and white and we could only find one location that shows signs of flooding:

Flooding in San Jose, California.

Factory fire in the Philippines
In February, a factory caught fire near General Trias, the Philippines, injuring more than a hundred workers and resulting in at least five fatalities.

Factory fire in the Philippines.

To find the above locations in Google Earth, download this KML file. We have included outlines of relevant imagery and a couple of placemarks for other interesting sights we found while exploring the areas.

More underwater maps to explore in Street View

June 10, 2014

Back in 2012, Google released some amazing underwater Street View imagery from a few areas around the world. As part of World Oceans Day last Sunday, Google has released some additional underwater Street View imagery that is equally stunning. In partnership with the Catlin Seaview Survey, you can now dive and explore some additional locations in Belize and the Philippines including the Belize Barrier Reef and Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park.

From the Google Lat Long Blog:

The Catlin Seaview Survey team has documented many underwater locales around the world using their 360-degree panoramic SVII cameras, including a growing number of UNESCO Marine World Heritage Sites. We’ll continue to add this imagery to Street View in Google Maps as it’s collected. In the spirit of World Oceans Day, the goal of this project is to expose the world to the beauty of these marine habitats, and to create a scientific baseline record so that their changing health can be monitored over time.

To learn more about these new additions, check out the full article on the Lat Long Blog or explore Google’s entire collection of underwater Street View imagery at maps.google.com/ocean.

You can also check out this article from last year that discusses some of the technical hurdles that they face when working to capture this kind of imagery.

Imagery from Typhoon Haiyan

November 13, 2013

As they often do after major events around the world, DigitalGlobe has begun pushing out a large amount of imagery from the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan.

In addition to the image above (which can be found on the DigitalGlobe blog), they’ve been adding quite a few stunning shots to Getty Images.

Taking things even further, DigitalGlobe is enlisting your help to attempt to map the devastation:

In support of such efforts, DigitalGlobe has activated a crowdsourcing campaign, open to anyone willing to help, which volunteers can join here. For this campaign, DigitalGlobe will be releasing the crowd produced results to the open source community. For your knowledge, this has been one of the most challenging Tomnod campaigns due to the sheer magnitude of damage. But within the first few hours DigitalGlobe had 27,000 map views and over 35,000 tags from volunteers!

It’s quite an undertaking, and creating this map will prove to be incredibly helping in the coming days and months as the area works to recover from the devastation of the storm.