New satellite imagery on Google Maps and Earth eliminates cloud cover

All Google mapping products will feature new satellite imagery starting today, courtesy an update. Matt Hancher, Tech Lead, Google Earth Engine reveals in a post that they’re unveiling new imagery of the earth from space that ‘virtually eliminates’ clouds. In addition to that, the new collection features refreshed imagery for those regions in the world where hi-res shots are not available.

The new Earth image!

Hancher starts off by explaining its Google Earth Engine technology that it used to create a “seamless, globally-consistent image of the entire planet." The inspiration to create such an image had been NASA’s Blue Marble image that it released in 2002. Blue Marble, as most would know is a global image of the Earth with a resolution of 1 km per pixel (This new image features a resolution of 15 metres per pixel). It was based on the data from NASA’s MODIS instrument. The image was last updated in 2005, and it has remained that way since.

The team working on this project analysed a large number of images and eliminated elements like stripes, clouds and other atmospheric effects. Just to give readers an idea of the imagery in question, Hancher says that the 800,000-megapixel global image is really big, so much so that if one were to print it at a standard resolution of 300 DPI, they would need a piece of paper as big as a city block. “Mining data from a large number of Landsat images of each area allowed us to reconstruct cloud-free imagery even in tropical regions that are always at least partly cloudy,” he explained.

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To view the new satellite imagery, head over to Google Maps and enable satellite view, or by launching Google Earth, and zooming out.