Google Announces Clear Skies for Google Maps and Earth [Images]

Google announced new satellite imagery for all Google mapping products today that virtually eliminates clouds, includes refreshed imagery for regions of the world where high-resolution imagery is not yet available, and offers a more comprehensive and accurate view of the texture of our planet's landscape.

In 2002 NASA released the Blue Marble, a global image of the earth with a resolution of one kilometer per pixel, based on data from NASA’s MODIS instrument. Updated in 2005 to twice the resolution, it has remained the canonical globally-uniform picture of the earth for over a decade. With the Blue Marble as inspiration, we used Google Earth Engine technology to mine hundreds of terabytes of data from the USGS’s and NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite. The result is a seamless, globally-consistent image of the entire planet with a resolution of 15 meters per pixel, far finer than is possible with MODIS data alone.

Check out a few images below or hit the link for more information on how Google created the imagery.


Read More