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Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

google-latlong.blogspot.de

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Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#22

Post by znowi »

Landsat 7 was launched in 1999. Had the Scan Line Corrector failure [1] in 2003 and has been taking striped images since then.

Landsat 8 is the recent addition launched in February 2013. Here you can see sample images from the satellite [2] and a side-by-side comparison to Landsat 7 [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsat_7#Scan_Line_Corrector_f...

[2] http://landsat.usgs.gov/LDCM_Image_Examples.php

[3] http://landsat.usgs.gov/LDCM_Underfly_with_Landsat_7.php

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#24

Post by magicalist »

meandthebean wrote: post #23

Here's a weird case: https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=43.047565,-123.758926&... Zoom in one and out one. The patchwork brown flops in some of the grid.

Is that logging, maybe? It looks like the more zoomed out was actually a picture taken later, as the areas that were cleared in the closer zoom become brownish-green, and there's all new areas that are all brown that were before all green.

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#25

Post by sliverstorm »

crazygringo wrote: post #3

I'm checking out the new Google Maps beta, and if you zoom all the way out in Earth mode, it actually puts the clouds back-in -- based on real-time satellite data. Pretty cool. Now if there were just a time slider... But it's also very cool that Google Maps no longers looks like a big patchwork of images from totally different satellites and sources. It actually looks seamless now, no matter where you're zooming. Tha…

I'm just waiting for performance to finish improving. It is better than it used to be (used to take 20-30 seconds to zoom on a modern computer), but still not great.

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#26

Post by ChuckMcM »

cryptoz wrote: post #20

It's pretty funny how far Google will go to avoid talking about the weather. They even put barometers in all their phones but aren't building a weather network or buying any weather startups (like mine)! What gives? They algorithmically remove weather, create an unused network of 50,000,000 barometers, gah!

Perhaps because Google Weather[1] will actually control the weather. A Google Pumping station every half kilometer or so, they are going to use the barometers in Android phones to give feedback on their actions. So if you need sunny weather the pumping stations will pull air from outside the area in and heat it up, if you want it to rain they will create a low pressure zone by pumping air out to a different zone. They need all the barometers to control which pumping stations are on and how much air they pump.

[1] This is entirely fictitious of course, but having worked there I could easily imagine just this description on the 'ideas' page.

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#27

Post by mjn »

kurt_ wrote: post #2

Another interressing articles on cloudless map on mapbox: * http://www.wired.com/design/2013/05/a-cloudless-atlas/ * http://www.mapbox.com/blog/improving-mapbox-satellite-by-mak...

There's also this series of month-by-month cloudless composite maps from NASA: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/

Neat to see things like icecaps expanding and retreating.

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#30

Post by andrewljohnson »

It's cool to see these images improve, but they just got this idea from MapBox, no? Just like they got the idea to move on vector and 3D from Apple. Is invention at Google Maps dead, and now we just watch as they ape their competitors to stay ahead?

Reactivity is to be expected from the entrenched player, but aping competitors alone won't keep Google relevant forever.

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