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Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

bbc.com

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Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#71

Post by kylebarron »

erk__ wrote: post #19
hatsunearu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://zoom.earth/ not quite real time (I'm not sure if that's even possible) but this is quite up to date. I used to to check out the smoke from last year. edit: you get pictures every 10 minutes of the whole globe, but the resolution is pretty bad, good enough to check the cloud coverage though

There is also https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/ which seems to be a bit higher resolution, I think they are imagin the whole earth every other day.

The two Sentinel-2 satellites together cover all land area of the Earth every 5 days, but are only 10-meter pixel resolution.

> 10 days at the equator with one satellite, and 5 days with 2 satellites under cloud-free conditions which results in 2-3 days at mid-latitudes

https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-2

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#72

Post by randompwd »

canada_dry wrote: post #48

Organizations/NGOs heavily rely on satellite imagery (i) to assist in delivering many humanitarian efforts. It would seem useful for the UN to strongly prohibit the diminishing of such capability. (i) www.hotosm.org

Lol. In what world would anyone accept the UN dictating this?

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#73

Post by Toxygene »

hatsunearu wrote: post #13
deadalus wrote: post #5

Is it possible to have real-time live-feed of the entire planet? If cost isn't an issue, would something like that be possible?

https://zoom.earth/ not quite real time (I'm not sure if that's even possible) but this is quite up to date. I used to to check out the smoke from last year. edit: you get pictures every 10 minutes of the whole globe, but the resolution is pretty bad, good enough to check the cloud coverage though

YMMV, but I just checked my neighborhood out and the satellite image is ~5 years old.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#75

Post by munk-a »

panarky wrote: post #54
canada_dry wrote: post #48

Organizations/NGOs heavily rely on satellite imagery (i) to assist in delivering many humanitarian efforts. It would seem useful for the UN to strongly prohibit the diminishing of such capability. (i) www.hotosm.org

The UN does not have this authority.

The UN is less a legislative body and more of an international treaty negotiation forum. If all of the UN member states agreed to such a thing then it certainly could be ratified - it sounds like it might vaguely fall under the purview of the first committee DISEC (Disarmament and International Security) and Israel might object to it but usually there's some bargaining involved in these sorts of things.

To my knowledge, there is, in fact, no strict limit on the authority the UN can have - but there may be some specific carve outs to other international bodies (i.e. laws of the sea - the division of antartica), however I think these carve outs were mostly made affirmatively by the UN to empower other organizations.

There is a separate question on whether the UN has the power to enforce legislation it passes, but that's a pretty simplistic reduction that can be applied to pretty much any governmental body and will almost always result in the answer of "It depends".

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#76

Post by yabones »

caymanjim wrote: post #34
deadalus wrote: post #5

Is it possible to have real-time live-feed of the entire planet? If cost isn't an issue, would something like that be possible?

The short answer is no. High-resolution imagery comes from low-orbit satellites, which make a complete orbit about every two hours, and image long, narrow strips with each pass, taking days to image the whole planet. There are many of these satellites: commercial, non-military (publicly-accessible) governmental, and governmental (secret), of varying resolutions. These are also supplemented by aerial (plane) imagery.…

There are also surveillance blimps, which I believe would be closest to a real-time feed. Some can apparently stay up for 30 days at a time. These have been tested for domestic intelligence, and radar (rather than optical) systems have been deployed overseas.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/blimplike...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#77

Post by skissane »

yaml-ops-guy wrote: post #50
JoshTriplett wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to cost, there are various national laws that restrict satellite imagery with resolution better than various thresholds.

Which the article indicates, at least as it relates to the US and her companies, is no longer the case: > In July 2020, the KBA was dropped, and now the US government allows American companies to provide far higher-quality images of the region (so that objects the size of a person can be readily picked out).

KBA wasn't dropped, it still applies. The law is still on the books.

KBA gives the regulator (NOAA) the authority to set a resolution limit for images of Israel. They are supposed to set it to be the best resolution commercially available from non-US providers. In 1998, NOAA set it at 2 metres. In July 2020, NOAA dropped it to 0.4 metres. NOAA had been dragging their feet about that – in 2018, evidence was presented to them of commercial availability of sub-2m resolution images of Israel from non-US providers, but they didn't accept it. Their argument apparently was that even if sub-2m resolution was commercially available, it wasn't "commercially available enough". One factor that changed their mind this time is widespread resale of foreign imagery by US resellers (the KBA only applies to sale of US-acquired imagery, US companies are legally free to resell foreign-acquired imagery.)

KBA still limits US providers to a 0.4 metre resolution of Israel. When foreign commercial providers start offering better than 0.4 metre resolution of Israel, NOAA may drop the limit again. But they may drag their feet that time too.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#78

Post by JumpCrisscross »

munk-a wrote: post #75
panarky wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN does not have this authority.

The UN is less a legislative body and more of an international treaty negotiation forum. If all of the UN member states agreed to such a thing then it certainly could be ratified - it sounds like it might vaguely fall under the purview of the first committee DISEC (Disarmament and International Security) and Israel might object to it but usually there's some bargaining involved in these sorts of things. To my knowled…

> there is, in fact, no strict limit on the authority the UN can have

There is no strict limit to the authority I can have. That doesn’t mean I can prohibit Google from doing squat. I could theoretically get the U.S. government to pass a law, but that’s not the same thing as authority.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#79

Post by munk-a »

berkes wrote: post #60
caymanjim wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer is no. High-resolution imagery comes from low-orbit satellites, which make a complete orbit about every two hours, and image long, narrow strips with each pass, taking days to image the whole planet. There are many of these satellites: commercial, non-military (publicly-accessible) governmental, and governmental (secret), of varying resolutions. These are also supplemented by aerial (plane) imagery.…

And even with such a budget: geostationary satellites over the poles are not possible[1] and really hard anywhere but over the equator, really. So that means most of the south and north part of the earth cannot be covered with such a constellation; they would need to be orbiting satellites, which makes "real time" even harder, because it would require an enormously complex choreography to ensure there's at least one…

But, we could always construct a dyson sphere around earth and rely on the rigidity of the structure to provide accurate polar images.

That said, it would be really difficult and quite likely not at all worth it.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#80

Post by kylebarron »

Toxygene wrote: post #73
hatsunearu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://zoom.earth/ not quite real time (I'm not sure if that's even possible) but this is quite up to date. I used to to check out the smoke from last year. edit: you get pictures every 10 minutes of the whole globe, but the resolution is pretty bad, good enough to check the cloud coverage though

YMMV, but I just checked my neighborhood out and the satellite image is ~5 years old.

Once you pass a certain zoom (looks like zoom 11.5 here) the imagery is no longer recent. You can see the copyright statement change to "Microsoft", where it presumably just loads data from Bing maps.

At lower zooms, where the copyright is something like "GOES-East", that's more real-time data because it comes from geostationary satellites that can take (low resolution) images every few minutes.

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