The Map Room

The Daily Mail has posted a collection of astronaut photos of the Earth at night taken from the International Space Station. Via @spacefuture.

The European Space Agency has launched a pilot study to see if avalanches can be mapped from space, to determine whether a road has been blocked — handy in remote regions where observation stations are few on the ground and aerial monitoring is expensive.

The European Space Agency has released a map of sea ice thickness in the Arctic based on observations by the CryoSat-2 satellite. “CryoSat measures the height of the sea ice above the water line, known as the freeboard, to calculate the thickness. The measurements used to generate this first map of the Arctic were from January and February 2011, as the ice approaches its annual maximum. The data are exceptionally detailed and considerably better than the mission’s specification. They even show lineations in the central Arctic that reflect the ice’s response to wind stress.” There’s also a map of Antarctic ice, but it’s preliminary.

Google Maps Mania links to NOAA’s collection of aerial tornado damage imagery from April and May, and has assembled a gallery of before-and-after images of the tornado damage (via).

Animations generated from GOES-13 satellite imagery of the supercell thunderstorms from the past week, including the storm that generated the tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri on May 22: here and here. Via Phil Plait.

Another year, another Icelandic volcano with a difficult-to-pronounce name. Here’s Earth Observatory’s satellite image of Grímsvötn’s ash cloud (above) and Ogle Earth’s post about visualizing said ash cloud in Google Earth. Here’s an ESA article on the ash plume…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s amazing how clear the damage from tornadoes appears in satellite imagery. Above, an ASTER visible-infrared image of a tornado’s path near Tuscaloosa, Alabama: “In the picture, captured just days after the storm, pink represents vegetation and aqua is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Esri reports that Landsat data dating back to 1972 is now available through ArcGIS Online….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Using Google Earth or Google Maps to spot the compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan in which Osama Bin Laden was hiding (until, um, yesterday) is, it turns out, a bit problematic, since the compound is more recent than the available satellite…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On The Atlantic’s website, a slideshow comparing modern-day satellite images of cities with city maps from the 1572 Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg. It’s not as effective as you might think: the atlas plates haven’t been georeferenced (some…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has satellite images and animations of the weather system that spawned so many tornadoes this week. Google Maps’s collection of tornado maps and images. The Wall Street Journal’s map of storm reports. Another map of storm…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a number of satellite images of the spring flooding in the Canadian Prairie Provinces and the U.S. Upper Midwest. The most recent image, above, is a MODIS image combining visual and infrared views of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Clement Valla collects instances where Google Earth’s 3D terrain layer doesn’t play well with the satellite and aerial imagery — elevated highways and bridges, for the most part. The effect is redolent of Dali — and it’s what happens…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has updated Google Earth’s base layer imagery with new high-resolution imagery from the Sendai, Japan area. The imagery was collected on Sunday and Monday, so this is an incredibly fast turnaround. The imagery will also be available in Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA Earth Observatory has released maps showing the decline of atmospheric ozone levels in the Arctic to what is approaching “the lowest levels in the modern instrumental era”: “These maps of ozone concentrations over the Arctic come from the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps Mania links to aerial imagery of Christchurch, New Zealand, taken only two days after the February 22 earthquake from an altitude of only 150 metres (500 feet). Resolution is 10 cm/pixel….  •  Continue reading this entry.

GOOD has a piece on Grassroots Mapping, an initiative that started by using balloons and kites to get aerial imagery of the Gulf oil spill in areas that were otherwise off-limits and that has since evolved into the Public Laboratory…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Post-earthquake imagery of Christchurch, New Zealand is now available through Google Earth and via a special Picasa web album link; both options allow you to see images from before and after the quake….  •  Continue reading this entry.

An eerily beautiful MODIS image of “cloud streets” across New England and the Maritimes from January 24, 2011. For another pretty image of winter from space, see this view of snow on the Korean peninsula. Previously: The Snowpocalypse from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Interesting animation from NASA showing three elements of the water cycle on a global scale. “The three animations of atmospheric phenomena were created using data from the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s a look at today’s snowstorm that hit much of North America, taken at 1445 UTC by one of NASA’s GOES satellites. Credit: NOAA/NASA GOES Project. NASA’s Earth Observatory has more views of this weather system, including this animation…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Follow Your World is a notification service for Google Earth/Google Maps satellite and aerial imagery updates: you can register a location with the service and, if that location gets fresh imagery, it sends you an e-mail alert. Requires a Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a number of high-resolution satellite images of the floods in Queensland, Australia. Nearmap managed to get an even closer look at the flooding, with two-centimetre-resolution imagery taken on January 13 and 14. ABC News (Australia)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has announced updated or new 45-degree aerial imagery — accessed through the satellite layer in Google Maps — for 10 U.S. cities, and promises that more cities are to come. Previously: Google’s Oblique Imagery Graduates; Bing, Google and MapQuest…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google: It’s been one year since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, and governments and NGOs are continuing to respond, many using high-resolution images of the area. To support these efforts, we’ve updated our aerial imagery in Google Earth of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has this map of aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere, based on MODIS data from August 2010. “Dust storms, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, and salt spray from the winds over the ocean are the most common and abundant producers…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This image maps sulphur dioxide emissions from the erupting Mount Merapi volcano in Indonesia: “This image shows concentrations of sulfur dioxide on November 4–8, 2010, as observed by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura spacecraft. Sulfur dioxide…  •  Continue reading this entry.

CNN has a piece on Christoph Gielen’s amazing photographs of suburban landscapes — read: sprawl — taken from a helicopter. Via @mrgeog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oh, so that’s what hit us. This image of the “weather bomb” that surprised the U.S. Midwest and much of central and western Canada — it knocked out our power a couple of times earlier this week — was…  •  Continue reading this entry.

You may recall that our friend Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog has been sailing around the world. Recently he made headlines because his kite aerial photography of Manihi atoll in French Polynesia, taken last May, has been added to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has announced that recent GeoEye imagery of the toxic sludge spill in hungary, taken on October 7, is now available as a KML overlay for Google Earth. The overlay view can be toggled between before- and after-the-spill views of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth Blog addresses the question: how often does Google update its imagery for Google Earth?…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a form of air pollution that has been linked to a number of diseases like asthma, bronchitis and cardiovascular disease, and is suspected as the cause of millions of premature deaths worldwide. Researchers at…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A post on the Ordnance Survey’s blog explains how they acquire and process aerial photography. “We have a large contract in place with external suppliers to supplement our own flying and photogrammetric production. This gives us the capacity to have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This image of sea ice at the North Pole is not a photo. It’s compiled from microwave data gathered by the Aqua satellite’s AMSR-E microwave sensor. “Ice emits more microwave radiation than water, making regions of the ocean with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Check out this image taken yesterday by Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite GOES-13 of Hurricane Danielle (top), Hurricane Earl (lower left) and a developing tropical depression (now Tropical Storm Fiona). Here’s one from this morning, more up to date but…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA has released movies showing the carbon monoxide levels present in the air as a result of the recent wildfires in Russia. “They show three-day running averages of daily measurements of carbon monoxide present at an altitude of 5.5…  •  Continue reading this entry.

These dramatic Landsat 5 images show a portion of southern Pakistan before and after the second wave of flooding hit; the images were taken only three days apart. More satellite images of the flooding in Pakistan here. Via Daily…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google’s bird’s-eye oblique imagery has graduated from the API and Google Maps Labs to a spot on the main Google Maps page, at least for a few locations (a couple in Europe and a bunch in South Africa and the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The GOCE satellite has produced a highly detailed map of the variations in the Earth’s gravity field. It shows the difference between the regular ellipsoid shape that is used to represent the Earth’s shape and the geoid — a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

BBC News reports on the launch of (and first images returned by) the German TanDEM-X satellite, which, along with the TerraSAR-X satellite launched in 2007, will generate a digital elevation model of the earth to a resolution of two metres….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Above, a MODIS image from NASA’s Terra satellite, taken last Saturday, showing the spread of the Deepwater Horizon slick in the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA has released an interactive map that “integrates the latest data the federal responders have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA has produced a time-lapse video of the expanding Gulf of Mexico oil slick: “This short video reveals a space-based view of the burning oil rig and, later, the ensuing oil spill through May 24. The timelapse uses imagery…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA and the European Space Agency have each posted same-day satellite imagery of the ash plume from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano: NASA from the MODIS instrument aboard its Terra satellite, the ESA from Envisat (at right). Previously: Earth Observatory and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has posted a number of images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, taken by the MODIS instruments on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. The photo above was taken on April 29….  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has posted a lot of images of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption; handily, there’s an index. Previously: Eyjafjallajökull and European Airspace; Eyjafjallajökull….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartophilia and The Map Scroll look at the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world, now all but dried up due to irrigation diversion. The above time-lapse video captures the Aral Sea’s disappearance. NASA’s Earth Observatory has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google hasn’t completely abandoned China; high-resolution imagery taken after last week’s earthquake in Qinghai is now available through Google Earth (KML link)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

There are satellite images of the ash clouds thrown up by the eruption of the volcano under Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier; the one above, captured by NASA’s Terra satellite on Wednesday, shows the ash plume following a straight line from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Earth Observatory’s Cities at Night features photography of the night side of the Earth taken by orbiting astronauts. “Astronauts circling the Earth have the wonderful vantage point of observing the nighttime Earth from 350-400 kilometers above the surface, taking…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The shmoo-like Google employees from College Humour’s “Google Street View Guys” video return to image the world for Google Earth from a balloon. (Note: it’s not entirely clean.) Via Google Earth Blog. Previously: Google Street View Guys….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The USGS released two satellite maps of the post-earthquake situation in Port-au-Prince last week: one in infrared, one in natural colour. Each is a 200-megabyte PDF. The maps are based on imagery we saw in raw form shortly after…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Collins Maps Blog points to two major collections of aerial photography that are browsable online: the National Library of Scotland’s collection of Ordnance Survey air photo mosaics of Scotland, taken between 1944 and 1950; and the National Collection of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA is marking the 10th anniversary of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), which took place aboard Endeavour during STS-99, with an image gallery. Previously: Exploring Ways of Using SRTM Data….  •  Continue reading this entry.

For the rest of you, the news is straightforward: Google Street View has added imagery from Norway and Finland, and has dramatically expanded its coverage of Canada, including more than 130 cities and major highways; it’s also added ski runs…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Recent updates to Google Earth include higher-resolution underwater terrain data for some parts of the ocean floor and historical aerial photography taken over European cities during the Second World War….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kottke notices that New York City’s mapping portal has aerial photos of the city from 1924. Deroy Peraza has some fun comparing them to aerial photos from the present day. Previously: NYCityMap….  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA has released a post-earthquake radar image of the Port-au-Prince region: “JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) captured this false-color composite image of the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the surrounding region on Jan. 27, 2010. Port-au-Prince…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A series of maps based on satellite imagery, including maps of damaged building density and oil spillage, from SERTIT. In English and French. Via Dave Smith. Gaia GPS has released a free iPhone app that is intended to help disaster…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This false-colour image of Haiti was taken by the ASTER instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite yesterday. The 15-cm-resolution imagery I mentioned in an earlier entry is available for download from Google; the very large files are intended for GIS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Satellite and Aerial Imagery Last night, Google released imagery of Port-au-Prince at even higher resolutions (15 cm) than before (above). The images were taken on Sunday, January 17, and will be available in Google Maps, in Google Earth by some…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory on the above image: “While not detailed enough to reveal earthquake damage to houses and buildings, this regional view of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, on January 15, 2010, illustrates some of the physical obstacles that have complicated the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The European Space Agency says that new satellite maps of Port-au-Prince are being produced. Data are being collected by various satellites including Japan’s ALOS, CNES’s Spot-5, the U.S.’s WorldView and QuickBird, Canada’s RADARSAT-2, China’s HJ-1-A/B and ESA’s ERS-2 and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Times has produced an extremely effective interactive map showing satellite imagery of Port-au-Prince before and after the earthquake in Haiti. The trouble with looking at the GeoEye-1 satellite’s post-earthquake imagery in its raw form is that it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s not just Europe: NASA’s Earth Observatory provides the same data mapped to a polar projection of the entire northern hemisphere: “This image illustrates how cold December was compared to the average of temperatures recorded in December between 2000…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Integrity Logic blog looks at some of the things that can be done with elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM); it gets particularly interesting when the SRTM data picks up artificial structures like skyscrapers and landfills….  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s been awfully cold in Europe this month, and this map shows just how much colder than normal it’s been, based on measurements taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite between December 11 and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory site has a feature article on the 2005 Global Land Survey, a collection of 9,500 Landsat images captured between 2004 and 2007: The images are detailed enough to make out features as small as 30 meters (about…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Maps compiled from data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) reveal the extent of ice sheet thinning in Antarctica and Greenland. ICESat’s precise laser altimetry instrument, launched in 2003, has provided a high-density web of elevation…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The first full-disk thermal infrared image of the Earth from the GOES 14 geostationary satellite, taken on August 17, shows Hurricane Bill forming in the Atlantic. In this image, the hotter a surface, the darker it appears; from the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Earlier this month, previously classified images showing the dramatic retreat of Arctic sea ice were released by the U.S. government. The one-metre-resolution images were taken by spy satellites on behalf of scientists studying climate change who were looking for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new digital terrain map for the planet is now available. Based on imagery from the Japanese ASTER instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite, the new global digital elevation model covers 99 percent of the Earth’s landmass to a resolution…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has made available recent satellite imagery of Tehran from the IKONOS satellite via a Google Earth layer. How recent? Last Thursday. It would have been higher resolution if it had come from the GeoEye-1 satellite, but weather apparently played…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Earth Observatory, celebrating its 10th anniversary, showcases 10 slideshows of “satellite images documenting how our world — forests, oceans, human landscapes, even the Sun — has changed during the previous decade.” Previously: Growth in Las Vegas….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Geological Survey of Canada has produced a geological map of the Arctic; the map is available in several formats online and will be published in print next year. Agence France-Press reports that the map is the result of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ryan has a couple of posts on the difference between orthophotography — geometrically corrected aerial photography — and “true” orthophotography; true orthophotos “add the dimension of correcting for the distortion of buildings. Or, simply stated, true orthophotos do not show…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google LatLong points to a couple of resources for residents of the Fargo-Moorehead area affected by the flooding of the Red River: this My Map, put together by the owner of several Fargo-area radio stations (see above), and this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This past week’s Virtual Earth imagery update is notable not for the terabytes of data, says the Virtual Earth evangelist blog, but for the number of countries covered — from Albania to Zimbabwe. Previously: Imagery Updates for Google Earth, Virtual…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Speaking of low-cost aerial photography, The Fiducial Mark links to a research paper on the use of kite-based aerial photography to produce high-resolution aerial imagery at a cost much lower than the usual method (which at that scale usually involves…  •  Continue reading this entry.

That’s one hell of a science project: four Spanish students, using an inexpensive latex balloon and a Nikon Coolpix camera, managed to record images and meteorological data from an altitude of as high as 30 kilometres before the balloon…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has exclusive access to the GeoEye-1 satellite’s high-resolution imagery for online mapping purposes; sample imagery from the satellite, which was launched last September and began commercial operations last month, has been posted as a sign of things to come….  •  Continue reading this entry.

It hasn’t been that long since the release of Google Earth 5.0, which added historical satellite and aerial imagery via a slider, but Google LatLong is already announcing a significant update to Google Earth’s archive of historical imagery; the blog…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Frank Taylor isn’t the first person to explain at length how Google Earth imagery isn’t real-time imagery, but it’s something that seems to require repeating; his explanation also goes into considerable depth about how old the imagery can be (months…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Both Google and Microsoft announced updated imagery for Google Earth and Virtual Earth last week; detailed lists of what areas have been updated are available on Google LatLong and the Virtual Earth evangelist’s blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Stupid Republican California Assemblyman Joel Anderson has introduced a bill to censor online satellite imagery of public buildings. “His bill would restrict the images such Web sites could post online. Clear, detailed images of schools, hospitals, churches and all government…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory provides Landsat 5 images of Las Vegas in five-year intervals from 1984 to 2009. The images show the city’s incredible rate of growth over that period. They also line up perfectly, so once again I’ve taken the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA imagery of the bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria can be found here (from which I took the above image) and here. See also Universe Today. Imagery from NASA’s MODIS imagery is apparently being updated twice daily….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ryan Strynatka compares oblique imagery to top-down imagery. In a nutshell, tall buildings. “One problem with nadir imagery is that it can be difficult to tell how tall buildings are, or gather any information about buildings (or anything other features…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Got aerial imagery? Google wants it — and now that Google Earth 5.0 supports historical imagery, it doesn’t matter how old it is (Google LatLong). James makes a valid (albeit snarky) point that this is another example of Google wanting…  •  Continue reading this entry.

January’s Virtual Earth imagery update includes a total 37 terabytes of data, Microsoft’s first use of Digital Globe satellite imagery, and, among other things, bird’s-eye imagery for Paris and other French cities (see also, naturally, GeoInWeb. In other Microsoft…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth 5.0 was released today, with a bunch of new features. The ocean layers were not unexpected: ocean floor bathymetry was released a couple of weeks ago (see Stefan’s critique), and the previously announced presence of Sylvia Earle…  •  Continue reading this entry.

iPhone Central’s review of the $1 satellite photo application for the iPhone, Earth Envi, suggests that a small mobile device may not be the best location to appreciate satellite imagery. “Truth is, many of pictures you see on Earth Envi…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As usual, I’m just about the last person to mention GeoEye’s high-resolution satellite image of the crowds attending President Obama’s inauguration, less than an hour before he was sworn in. It’s available as a KML layer for Google Earth;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last month, the Armed Services Inauguration Committee revealed to the public a 40×40-foot map used to plan the inauguration (via Vector One); another view is here (thumbnail above; via MapHist). New Google Earth imagery for Washington, D.C. finally de-pixellates…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m a huge fan of The Big Picture; today’s entry features some “standout photographs” from NASA’s Earth Observatory site, which I’ve mentioned before but which bears mentioning again. Above, volcanic rock in Harrat Khaybar in Saudi Arabia, taken by…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another Google Earth imagery update; details at Google Earth Blog and/or Google LatLong. Yahoo’s expanded its international map coverage. “We’ve added detailed coverage to 45 new countries, with new data in a further 30 countries,” says the Yahoo Geo…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An exhibition of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s amazing aerial photography is coming to New York next spring: Earth from Above, the exhibition, will run from May 1 to June 28, 2009, at the World Financial Center Plaza. The Big Picture has a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Maps and satellite images from UNOSAT showing the damage caused by the conflict between Russian and Georgian forces over South Ossetia and Abkhazia last month. Via Catholicgauze….  •  Continue reading this entry.

With even more hurricanes on the way, Google has added a “Hurricane Season 2008” folder to Google Earth. Previously: Post-Gustav Imagery; Mapping Hurricane Gustav….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google LatLong points to NOAA aerial imagery taken after the passage of Hurricane Gustav; the imagery has also been processed into a KML file for use in Google Earth, which would allow for some useful before/after comparisons. (The entry also…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Hurricane Gustav Tracking Maps Firstcoastnews.com FLHurricane.com IbisEye MIBAZAAR MSNBC StormAdvisory (click on Gustav) Wundermap Some are better than others; IbisEye, MSNBC and Wundermap are standouts. Via Anything Geospatial, Google Maps Mania, Kottke and La Cartoteca. Hurricane Gustav in Google Earth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A real find via Slashgeo: an internal document about the Imagery Interpretation Section (5 MB PDF) of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Division, dating from 1963. The document’s purpose was to promote the Section’s work to unit commanders. It also…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Journal of Terrestrial Observation is a new peer-reviewed journal that is published simultaneously online and as a hardcopy quarterly. Its mission is “to examine the multi-disciplinary theories, models, technologies, and applications associated with earth observation in the broadest sense….  •  Continue reading this entry.

You may be aware that, in addition to The Map Room, I have another project that I work on during the Olympics: DFL, which chronicles last-place finishes. I’m at it again — this is my third kick at the Olympic…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Considerable buzz about an upcoming BBC series, Britain from Above. This preview (screen capture above; I wish I could have embedded the video here, it’s pretty good) uses GPS traceroutes to show sea, road and air traffic; it also…  •  Continue reading this entry.

All Points Blog: “Speaking at the ESRI UC Senior Executive Summit in San Diego, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that the 35 years of archived Landsat data will be made available over the Web free to the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A NASA satellite, the Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2, primarily measures the height of the ocean surface with a radar altimeter. It also has a sensor to measure atmospheric moisture; this map represents water vapour in the atmosphere measured…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Speaking of which, the Virtual Earth evangelist blog also reports on 14.3 terabytes of new imagery for Virtual Earth….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps, a compilation of locations whose aerial imagery has been obscured in Google Earth and Maps. Categories range from government and military facilities to power generation sites; the list…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Environmental Graffiti reprints a collection of beautiful false-colour Landsat 7 images — 30 in all — first put on display by NASA at the Library of Congress in 2000. Via Andrew Sullivan….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oceandots is a collection of NASA satellite and astronaut imagery of the world’s islands and atolls — and not just the tiny, isolated ones like Pitcairn, Clipperton or Tristan da Cunha, either, though they’re certainly well represented and are…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth Blog has a roundup of the latest imagery updates to Google Earth. Update, 7/16: Google LatLong post….  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is interesting: thermal images of London from space, from the air, and from a high vantage point. Part of a site dedicated to thermal imagery of London, but this page is what’s of interest to us. At right,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The wonderful blog Modern Mechanix reprints another contemporary article about early aerial photography: “He Made Sky Mapping a Big Business” was first published in the May 1936 issue of the eponymous magazine. Previously: “Flying Cameras Map America for War”: Aerial…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More on the devastation wrought on Burma (Myanmar) by Cyclone Nargis: UNOSAT has maps of the affected regions (as PDF files); the maps show the extent of flooding and the villages that have been completely submerged or flooded. Via Glenn….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Satellite images from before and after Cyclone Nargis struck the Burmese (Myanmarese?) coast….  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a page of photos of cities at night taken from space; at right, Tokyo. “Astronauts circling the Earth have the wonderful vantage point of observing the nighttime Earth from 350-400 kilometers above the surface, taking…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Historic Aerials “provides free online access to historic and current aerial photography. You can view aerial photography from the 1930s through today. Use our multi-year comparison tools to detect changes in property.” Covers a good chunk of the U.S., with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

What drives Glenn nuts about media coverage of Google Earth “is that most of these ‘writers’ refer to the imagery as being ‘Google’s’ as if a big bird is circling the Earth capturing high-res imagery almost daily. Hey man, the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I will have something on the Microsoft Live Maps/Virtual Earth update presently (once I go through all the material, and there’s a lot to go through). In the meantime, though, Yahoo Maps hasn’t been idle either, with a huge imagery…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Times: “Mary Meader, who as a spunky new bride in the 1930s took off on a 35,000-mile journey to advance geographic knowledge by making unprecedented aerial photographs of South America and Africa, died Sunday in Kalamazoo, Mich….  •  Continue reading this entry.

“Flying Cameras Map America for War”, an article from the May 1939 issue of Popular Science, has been reprinted on the always-fascinating Modern Mechanix blog. The article looks at the state of the art with respect to aerial photography just…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Unearthed Outdoors has made its True Marble 250m-resolution satellite imagery available for download under a Creative Commons licence; their 15m-resolution imagery costs money. The files are available either in GeoTIFF or PNG format and range from 32-kilometre to 250-metre…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of quick updates about Google’s mapping stuff — quick updates seem to be all I have time or energy for at the moment, what with the full-time contract and the resulting lengthy commute. Google Transit’s features have been…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nikolas Schiller writes: The other day you featured my analysis concerning Google’s censorship of downtown Washington, D.C. I am contacting you with two updates concerning this research. 1. I discovered that the area in question is the exact same area…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google announces the latest Google Earth imagery update with a cryptic blog entry inviting us to guess from the clues; those with less patience can turn to Digital Earth Blog for the answers. (Update: Google’s official answers.) If the Ottawa-area…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you also like satellite images of other planets, proceed immediately to the home page of the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: “During its mission, HiRISE will collect thousands of images of the Martian surface, covering only…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nikolas Schiller writes to point out an article in today’s Washington Post about Google’s updated imagery of Washington, D.C., and how Google massaged the fact that the most recent imagery available — 2005 imagery from the USGS — censored several…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Even though the new street-level imagery from Google is getting all the attention lately, the issue of censoring satellite and aerial imagery has not gone away. Not by a long shot. Via Ogle Earth: Henri Willox noted yesterday that French…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A big update to Google Earth’s imagery and terrain layers on Saturday that includes Canadian, German and French cities, U.S. counties, Japanese cities/regions, 50-cm-resolution imagery for England, 60-cm imagery for many areas including Antarctica and Greenland, and 10-metre terrain for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Probably not fortuitous that Microsoft’s monthly Virtual Earth imagery update (see previous entry) also took place today: the Virtual Earth/Live Maps blog has the details; I note with interest that Ottawa, the closest city to me, is among the cities…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Fed up with waiting for aerial photography for your area to show up in online maps? Take your own with a quadrocopter! The Universal Aerial Video Platform is an open-source project from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Via MAKE: Blog…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From last year, a brief article on Google’s Librarian Central on the sources of Google Earth imagery. We collect it via airplane and satellite, but also just about any way you can imagine getting a camera above the Earth’s surface:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Virtual Earth imagery updates are apparently a monthly thing now: here’s news of the latest, which includes updates for Italy, France, Mexico, Canada and the U.S., including more U.S. bird’s-eye imagery….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Live, accessible satellite imagery is a pipe dream, but EarthNow is probably as close as we’ll ever get: it’s not live, but (updated; see below) it is real-time — just delayed a few hours. It’s essentially a Java applet…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tim likes the idea of aerial photography on a GPS unit, which is now starting to become available: it adds a layer of information that you might otherwise miss with topo maps — he cites vegetation as an example….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has updated its New Orleans imagery in response to the outcry over its decision — made last September — to update that imagery with higher-quality images that were unfortunately, and impolitically, before Hurricane Katrina. The Official Google Blog: [I]n…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has apparently replaced post-Katrina images of New Orleans with imagery from before the hurricane clobbered the city, and people are upset about that, the AP reports (choose your source for the same article: Boston Globe, Guardian, Houston Chronicle,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Hot on Google’s heels, there’s a major imagery update for Virtual Earth, with dozens of cities in Europe and the U.S. getting bird’s-eye photography, as well as high-resolution orthoimagery coming to a number of U.S. and Canadian locales. Previously: Virtual…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yet another imagery update for Google Earth: updates to Spain, Connecticutt and Austin, Texas; high-resolution imagery for a number of English locations, a number of U.S. counties, the French cities of Poitiers and Rennes, and downtown Vancouver, B.C. Via Ogle…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Chad tries to address the confusion about a series of high-resolution images appearing in Google Maps and Google Earth. It seems to me that there are two misconceptions: that they’re all satellite images, and that they are real-time (or…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yesterday’s Washington Post had a major piece about Nikolas Schiller, who’s been doing artful things with aerial photography and doing his best to stay under the web’s collective radar. (Sorry.) Excerpts from the Post article: Schiller barely pauses on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica “combines nearly 1100 hand-selected Landsat satellite scenes that are being digitally woven together to create a single, seamless, cloud-free image of the Antarctic continent — the most detailed color representation of this vast…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Recent updates to the satellite and aerial imagery in Google Maps and Earth include 50-cm resolution imagery for Switzerland and Denmark, high-resolution (10 m) terrain for Switzerland, several French cities, full coverage for Utah and Wyoming, and a number of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I can’t see it because I’m on a Mac and this is a Virtual Earth mashup, but Detroit Through the Years, which displays aerial views of Detroit from 1949 to the present, sounds like a fascinating project. Let me know…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A $1-million project to map the terrain of Portland, Oregon will take place over the next few weeks, the Oregonian reports. The aerial LIDAR survey is intended to create a hyper-accurate terrain map that will be particularly useful in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

World Wind 1.4 is now out: it’s Windows-only and requires .Net 2.0; Chad says the cross-platform Java version is expected around May. Previously: World Wind Update….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Stefan broke the news this morning that Spot Image’s 2.5-meter-per-pixel imagery had been added to Google Earth; this is apparently a substantial improvement over the 15-meter-per-pixel base layer. More from Spot Image itself; the countries affected include Belgium, France, Belgium,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Stefan has discovered two brand-spanking-new blogs that have started up this very month: the Google Earth Hacks blog accompanies the site of the same name; MapWrapper.com is a GIS blog with an interest in earth sciences and remote sensing. Previously:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

New bird’s-eye imagery for Virtual Earth, this time covering more than 100 European cities — mostly in Italy, France and Germany, but also the Netherlands, Spain, and one city in Norway. (Though technically we should also say Monaco, since Monte…  •  Continue reading this entry.

And the satellite imagery arms race continues. Via James comes news of a deal between Microsoft and GlobeXplorer that will add more than a million square kilometres of high-resolution imagery to Virtual Earth….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Like ArcGIS Explorer (previously), NASA World Wind is another application to which I’ve been giving short shrift, a consequence of my Mac-only household. And the Java version that would run on Mac OS X and Linux that was scheduled…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Still catching up on some older stories. Two weeks ago, the Florida Times-Union profiled a local home-based business, Outfitter’s Mapping, that produces aerial photographic maps of Florida fishing areas. Via All Points Blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A major update to Virtual Earth this week: new three-dimensional city textures for Minneapolis-St. Paul, Tacoma, Sacramento, the L.A. suburbs and Irving, Texas on the one hand; a massive imagery and terrain update for Italy on the other. James explores…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yet another round of terrain and imagery updates for Google Earth; Stefan and Frank pass along the details. The updates include, among other things, a terrain upgrade for Mt. Saint Helens. Previously: Google Earth Terrain and Imagery Upgrades; Another Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

There has been an explosion in mining claims lately; the Environmental Working Group’s U.S. Mining Database uses the Google Maps API to show active mines and claims on federal lands in the western United States. (There’s also a Google Earth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Improvements to Virtual Earth announced this week include a new navigation control for bird’s-eye imagery and a new distance-measurement tool; James likes….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Smithsonian’s Earth from Space is an online exhibition of satellite imagery; images include climate, geology and human activity. It’s also a physical exhibition, on a tour that began last month and continues until January 2010. Lesson plans are…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is an interesting development: Yahoo! is letting OpenStreetMap use its aerial imagery. If that isn’t a boost to the project, I don’t know what is. I wonder what’s behind this move. See also The Earth Is Square and Geobloggers….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ogle Earth reports on terrain and imagery upgrades in Google Earth; locations updated include 12 German cities, six British regions, the island of Oahu, and the troubled Sudanese region of Darfur….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Links regarding the Virtual Earth 3D launch last week have been piling up in my files; time once more to clear out the queue and share them with you. Brian Flood takes a good look at some of Virtual Earth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In other Virtual Earth news, a localized version for Japan was also launched yesterday, replete with geocoding, yellow pages, road maps and satellite imagery….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Reactions to, and follow-up stories about, yesterday’s announcement of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D thingy (previously): The AP story focuses on the Microsoft vs. Google implications of this release (via MapHist). In that vein, Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog says,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Between high-rise buildings and easily accessible satellite imagery, buildings’ roofs are getting a second look — not just by casual viewers dinking around with Google Earth, but by architects, the L.A. Times reports. Sometimes the impact of new mapping…  •  Continue reading this entry.

CNet reports the launch of Virtual Earth 3D, a component of Live Search that integrates three-dimensional models of 15 U.S. cities (so far) into search results — a flyover/Flight Simulator view, I suppose. Comes with virtual billboards for advertising. Microsoft’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The BBC program Click featured aerial photography on last weekend’s episode; the online article discusses the imagery’s use and impact on life, business and so forth. Via Ed Parsons and Very Spatial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s something different. While at PopTech, Jason Kottke discovered the Twisty Table, which was developed as a way to navigate high-resolution satellite imagery. “When you spin the table, the map zooms in and out and tilting the table scrolls…  •  Continue reading this entry.

What? MapQuest now has satellite/aerial imagery? When did that happen? See previous entries: More About MapQuest’s Future; MapQuest at 10; AP: MapQuest and the Competition….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The popularity of online mapping sites is having an impact on aerial- and satellite-imagery companies, Newsweek reports. Long dependent on government contracts, these companies now find their new clients — Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! et al. — contributing increasing amounts to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another update to Google’s satellite imagery today, Maps and Earth at the same time. Here’s an announcement. Via Google Earth Blog; I expect Frank Taylor will be adding to the list as more updates are discovered. See previous entry: Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The UN Environment Programme’s atlas, One Planet, Many People: Atlas of Our Changing Environment, was announced in June 2005 and has been available as a free download since at least last February. (You can always buy the book, of course.)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Earth Wallpapers is a collection of desktop backgrounds created from Google Maps satellite images. Each image comes in several sizes; the back end is powered by Flickr (the images are available through Flickr here). Copyright issues notwithstanding, these are…  •  Continue reading this entry.

There are reports here and there that Google has updated its satellite imagery. The images are certainly loading differently for me: lower-resolution photos are being used at wider zoom levels, and they seem to be cached differently. More as more…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The National Agricultural Imagery Program collects aerial photographs of farmers’ fields during the growing season. According to an NPR story, one of NAIP’s purposes is to check on what farmers are planting — to make sure that they qualify…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Earth Observatory’s weekly mailing is a good way to discover some of the latest satellite imagery, both true- and false-colour; this past week, there was this startling look at ocean temperatures in the hurricane zone. Yellow and up are…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yahoo! reports that it has added high-resolution satellite imagery for nearly 30 metropolitan areas outside the United States, and upgraded the imagery for U.S. cities as well. See previous entries: Yahoo! International Satellite Imagery; Yahoo! Maps Satellite Imagery….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ben has posted an e-mail exchange to the Geowanking mailing list that confirms that, according to a DigitalGlobe representative, “Google has signed an exclusive agreement with us to display our full-resolution imagery on the web,” which means that Google Maps…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth blog: “This week we rolled out a new release of Live Local featuring full support for Australia.” Streets, geocoding, directions, business listings and more aerial imagery….  •  Continue reading this entry.

BLDGBLOG’s been having fun with images from NASA’s Earth Observatory again (see previous entry), linking to this collection of MODIS images of Africa during 2005, showing the occurrence of fires deliberately set by people as part of their agricultural…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory reports on a new satellite-imagery-based mapping — the example is of the Washington-Baltimore area — that shows how much “impervious surface” there is in the area: “These space-based maps of buildings and paved surfaces, such as…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yahoo! has added high-resolution satellite imagery for a number of “international” (read: non-U.S.) cities. They list a fair number in Mexico, a few in Canada, and several in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Cartography compares the imagery with Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The European Space Agency has released more than a thousand high-resolution satellite images, most of which were acquired by the Agency’s Earth Observation satellites. Here’s the site for the images; it’s searchable rather than browseable, unfortunately. Via Cartography and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps Mania reports that, as expected, the new high-resolution satellite imagery that came to Google Earth earlier this month has now trickled down to Google Maps….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ooo. A map of lightning strikes based on NASA satellite data (more on which here). Via BLDGBLOG. Update, June 20: Frank has made a Google Earth layer out of this map….  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s new CloudSat satellite takes cross-section images of cloud interiors, allowing researchers to see cloud formations in 3D. The images are essentially transects rather than maps, but can supplement and inform weather-related satellite imagery the same way as ground…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth Blog and Ogle Earth report that more areas of the planet now have high-resolution imagery in Google Earth, many of which are low-population areas like South Georgia Island, Siberia, the Australian interior and — wow — the Himalayas….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartography links to more maps and imagery of the Indonesian earthquake, including satellite images here and here, as well as situation maps from ReliefWeb. See previous entries: Indonesian Earthquake; Indonesian Earthquake in Google Earth….  •  Continue reading this entry.

While governments fret about losing security at the hands of publicly available, high-resolution satellite imagery, it’s worth remembering that revealing things that governments would rather leave hidden is frequently a very good thing. Last week, the American Association for the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Cartography and Catholicgauze, maps and satellite photos produced by UNOSAT of the earthquake-stricken areas of Indonesia, both before and after the quake….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Real-time data (or at least near real-time data) exists in the online mapping world, just not the real-time satellite and aerial imagery that uninformed people get exercised about — take traffic congestion data, for example. Weather data is another possibility…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Earthshots: Satellite Images of Environmental Change is a collection of Landsat images of certain locations from different years (usually from 1972 to 2000) that show the changes to agriculture, urbanization and other activities in Landsat’s false-colour imagery, from the Ogallala…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Ogle Earth, a comparison of Google Earth and World Wind. Though I detect a distinct preference for World Wind’s open/free terms of use (it is, after all, a page on World Wind Central’s wiki), it’s quite positive about both…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Windows Live Local got a major update today; see the official blog for an overview of what they call “the biggest release yet of Windows Live Local.” The update includes real-time traffic data (the TechCrunch post covering the launch has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I love looking at the images on Views of the Earth: Artificial Images of Our Real Planet, where Christoph Hormann has taken satellite images and reprocessed them. The end results are astonishing: views from a height, on cloudless days, that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A rising tide lifts all boats, it’s said, and the interest in the satellite and aerial imagery available through the online mapping services and Google Earth has been very good to the aerial photography industry, who are able to capitalize…  •  Continue reading this entry.

First there was a massive update of Google Earth’s satellite and aerial photography, much of which affected (and improved) the imagery for Europe. Then that imagery was carried over to Google Maps, which again had an impact on European views….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Batch Geocoding Blog has a comparison of the Google, MapQuest and Yahoo! mapping APIs; it’s a quick outline of what the author sees as the pros and cons of each. Via Very Spatial. Alex Stengel says MapMemo 2.5…  •  Continue reading this entry.

SF, the model city, uploaded by mathowie. Barbieri’s stunning photography, which I posted about in January, uses an expensive tilt-shift lens to make aerial photography look like photos of models rather than the real thing. But you can fake the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Now that it’s available for the Mac, Macworld reviews Google Earth. Robert Gelb reviews Chandu Thota’s Programming MapPoint in .NET: “The bottom line is that if you are developing anything mapping related with Microsoft components, you gotta buy this book….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The UN atlas One Planet, Many People has been making the rounds of the mapping blogosphere lately — see, for example, Very Spatial and Le Petit Blog Cartographique — probably due to it being featured on the Landsat project news…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Gateway to Astronaut Photography is an enormous collection of photographs taken by astronauts over a period of decades. From the site: “Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken photographs of the Earth. Our database…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been off my feed a bit this past week, so I’ve got some catching up to do. I’ll start with a few random links from here and there about this and that. From the Google Blog: “Not only have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Olivo Barbieri’s model world: “It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real. They look uncannily like hyperdetailed models, absent the imperfections of reality. Streets are strangely clean, trees look plastic, and odd distortions of scale…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A clickable map of Tlingit tribes, clans and clan houses in the Pacific Northwest. Via Plep. MapPoint B2B on the future of MSN Maps and Directions, viz., none: “The time has come to say good-bye to MSN Maps and Directions…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve got to hunker down and produce a big post about the controversial Chinese map that purportedly proves that the Chinese discovered the Americas, but in the meantime, here are a few links about satellite images, online maps and advertising….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The first public build of Virtual India (the Microsoft Research project with imagery that satisfies Indian security concerns; see previous entry) is now online, according to the Virtual Earth blog. Four languages; street maps for Bangalore only; works in Firefox…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Dr. William Bowen writes to tell us about his project, the Utah Atlas of Panoramic Images: “This latest web publication includes 887 photorealistic mathematical simulations of Utah’s complex landscape.” He adds that “it is important to realize that the panoramas…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ben Keene, the editor of Oxford University Press’s atlas program (see previous entry), looks at the changes in geography he had to deal with in 2005 (via World Hum). MapQuest has inadvertently left Edmonton off a map of Canadian cities…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If I make these posts a regular occurrence, I’ll have to come up with a catchier title. Anyway, onward, with a few things about online maps and a couple of conferences to tell you about: Ads appearing on Google Maps?…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Our friend Frank Taylor of Google Earth Blog has put together a page of Google Earth Basics for people new to Google Earth. That’s basically me: while I’ve been reporting what I could about Google Earth since its launch, I…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As an experiment, a lot of new links at once: A new Google Earth blog with a rather unwieldy title: Using Google Earth for Earth Science and Remote Sensing (via Ogle Earth). The Prejudice Map is built by querying Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A busy day for Mac users, and not just because of the Macworld keynote. Google Earth for the Mac is now officially available (via GPS Review). Key system requirements: OS X 10.4 (Tiger), a 400-MHz processor, and 16 MB of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Frank Bisono and Jaron Brass have managed to take a look at the Google Earth OS X preview that seems to be making the rounds; both have dual or quad G5 Power Macs, so naturally they report good performance. Commenters…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mac rumour site AppleInsider claims that a long-hoped-for OS X version of Google Earth is under development: “Earlier this month, a pre-release version of Google Earth for Mac OS X that uses OpenGL rendering reportedly began making the rounds overseas….  •  Continue reading this entry.

India doesn’t seem to want to leave Google alone: after complaining about the satellite data in Google Earth, the Indian government is back to complaining about the labelling of Kashmir (via GeoCarta). See previous entries: Google Earth: Indian Reactions, Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Australian government makes satellite imagery, geology maps (1:250,000 scale) and spatial data available free of charge. Via Glenn’s GISUser Weblog. See previous entry: Satellite Images and the Weather….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Landsat data in MrSid format, from Landsats 4 and 5 in 1990 and Landsat 7 in 2000, from NASA’s Applied Sciences Directorate. Via All Things Geography. Meanwhile, Landsat 5 is apparently experiencing technical difficulties. Via Very Spatial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Plep points to the Greater Toronto Area Digital Mapping Project, done by the University of Toronto’s map library. It’s old-style and not very accessible (it requires a plugin), but it’s got a collection of old maps and more recent aerial…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here we go again. Google Earth Blog has a collection of downloadable automated storm tracking tools (KMZ file). Google Maps Mania points to a couple of Google Maps based storm trackers. Spatially Adjusted links to ESRI’s existing hurricane viewer and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The always excellent Kathryn Cramer points to satellite imagery of the earthquake-stricken areas of Pakistan: one-metre-resolution photos from Space Imaging, an image from NASA’s Earth Observatory showing the quake epicentres and fault line, and a page of images from the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kathryn Cramer reports that new Rita overlays for Google Earth based on updated NOAA imagery are now available. Meanwhile, Wired carries an AP story about mapping the storm surge from Katrina: surveyors are trying to create an atlas of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The big news this week for Google watchers this week is the announcement Wednesday of a memorandum of understanding between Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center. Press releases from ARC and Google; news coverage from the San Jose Mercury News…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Once more into the breach. India is the latest country where concerns are being expressed about the high-resolution imagery in Google Earth, now that several Indian cities have had their photos updated. As usual, the concern is about sensitive installations…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kathryn Cramer reports that the first post-Hurricane Rita images from the areas hardest hit by the storm have been posted by NOAA. As was the case with Katrina, the interface — starting with a base map index page — is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ogle Earth reports that New York state comptroller Alan Hevesi is the latest politician to freak out about Google Earth as a potential tool for terrorists. But Hevesi does it in a particularly odious manner, invoking his status as trustee…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m totally the last person to be reporting this. A couple of weeks ago, Ogle Earth pointed to the story of Italian blogger Luca Mori (whose site seems to be down at the moment), who used Google Maps and Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

UCSB graduate student Jeff Hemphill’s home page has a marvellous collection of satellite and Landsat images as desktop wallpaper. They’re all in 1280×1024 resolution — too bad for those of us with widescreen monitors. Via both Very Spatial and MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Fantastic multidimensional satellite imagery of Hurricane Rita from NOAA; via Spatially Adjusted. Also, you can now track Hurricane Rita with Virtual Earth; via Scoble. On an organizational note, I’ve combined entries about Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita into a new…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Directions has compiled a page of links to U.S. government maps related to Hurricane Rita; this will be updated as new information becomes available, they say. James Fee, in re ESRI helping various government agencies: “It seems that everyone has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

There are several resources for keeping tabs on the next volley of tropical storms to hit the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. NOAA’s Storm Tracker page for Rita and Philippe has tracking maps and satellite photos. Google Earth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

While I wait for the long-promised Mac version of Google Earth (hint), I note with interest that both Google Earth and Google Maps got their satellite imagery updated (Google Earth Blog, Google Maps Mania). But a separate enhancement is even…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Glenn of GISuser.com has been collecting photos, maps and other graphics related to hurricanes — Katrina in particular, naturally — on his Flickr account. Late to the party, but Microsoft has put in a solid, if buggy effort with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s been a few days since I last posted on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Here are a few more links. Apologies for letting them accumulate. ESRI’s Hurricane Katrina Disaster Viewer is, according to ESRI’s Lisa Kensok, who submitted this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

When the satellite-photo version of Google Maps came out earlier this year, there was some apprehension about the impact of these high-resolution photos on individual privacy. For example, some nervousness about being able to see the car in your driveway….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Over on GeoCarta, Roger goes beyond the latest satellite and aerial photography of New Orleans (which is what’s getting the lion’s share of attention); he looks at NOAA’s survey of the damage to the Mississippi River shipping channel and has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In addition to the Forbes article I mentioned yesterday, both the BBC and New York Times (free registration required) cover the use of Google Maps and Earth by ordinary users to collect and distribute information about the disaster — i.e.,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been getting e-mail from people asking about the state of various locations in and around New Orleans and other areas hit by Hurricane Katrina. I’m not the best person to answer such questions — I’m just someone from small-town…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Orbimage’s satellite photos of New Orleans post-Katrina, here and here, are in black and white; as a result, the detail is much sharper and the flooded parts of the city are much more visible, as the example above (courtesy…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been reorganizing my categories a bit; my Hurricane Katrina entries now have their own category. More satellite imagery: Before and after satellite images from GlobalSecurity.org. Landsat’s before and after images seem to have more detail than the others. NASA…  •  Continue reading this entry.

(Updated) More satellite imagery from the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina is being made available. Space Imaging’s Image Gallery has images of New Orleans before Katrina and Mobile, Alabama after Katrina (via Cartography). Digital Globe’s Hurricane Katrina Media Gallery has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

(Updated) Susan Kitchens has compiled and sent along an animated image (680-KB animated GIF) that shows the New Orleans area before and after Hurricane Katrina passed through; per her suggestion, I’m hosting it on my server. See previous entries: Hurricane…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another new blog to bring to your attention: Frank Taylor’s solid and eponymous Google Earth Blog. Via Ogle Earth. Map blogging is coming on fast and furious; that’s the fifth new blog I’ve reported on this month, and I know…  •  Continue reading this entry.

(Many updates) Watch Hurricane Katrina’s path via satellite imagery or radar; both are NOAA pages and both require Java. Via Paulo. Kathryn Cramer has been collecting aerial images of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, along with some…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In other natural disaster news, Vector One has linked to ESA satellite imagery of the Portuguese wildfires and floods in Austria, Switzerland and Germany….  •  Continue reading this entry.

(Many updates) I’ve been looking for maps and satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina. So far, I’ve found this page from the National Hurricane Center and this page (a popup) from the NOAA Storm Tracker site, which has many of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Flash Earth presents Google Maps and Virtual Earth satellite imagery through a Flash application. Why a Flash application, you may ask? The creator, Paul Neave, explains why: [T]he interface is much smoother to use. You get a sense of location…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Alabama Maps is a big collection of maps from the University of Alabama’s Cartographic Research Laboratory, in three main sections: contemporary maps, which features maps generated by the laboratory; historical maps, a collection of digitized images of old maps (not…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A week after the launch, Directions’s Adena Schutzberg takes a sober second look at MSN Virtual Earth, its features — including “Locate Me” and the Scratch Pad — and its (lack of) hacks. “While I tend to agree that for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I don’t know how I missed Ogle Earth, but now that I’ve found it I’m keeping an eye on it. Written by Stefan Geens, with a mandate is to focus on Google Earth and its competitors, Ogle Earth has been…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another site collecting interesting satellite images from the online mapping services in the Google Globetrotting idiom: Best of World Maps, which provides links to landmarks through Google Maps, Google Earth, and NASA World Wind, which is a new twist. No…  •  Continue reading this entry.

By now you’ve no doubt heard the one about MSN Virtual Earth “deleting” Apple’s headquarters. But it’s obviously not a case of Microsoft editing out its rivals; Microsoft is simply using very old imagery. For another example, the World Trade…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Scoble was dropping hints Saturday that the launch of MSN Virtual Earth (previous entry) was coming up. The official launch is, in fact, mere minutes away as I write this. But, thanks to some last-minute testing, Virtual Earth was live…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps has introduced a so-called hybrid mode that overlays a street grid, names and route numbers on the satellite/aerial imagery. I have to confess that I’m awfully impressed by this; it really renders moot the question of switching between…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nick writes on Here Be Dragons: “I was just playing with multimap.com’s aerial photograph feature, and noticed something I hadn’t seen mentioned on here before — Ordnance Survey map overlays applied dynamically on mouseover over the aerial photo.” Nick’s example….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m in the awkward position of having to write posts about Google Earth without so much as being able to download it — at least, not until their promised Mac version comes out. Until that hopefully-not-too-long-off day, I can only…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The European Space Agency’s ENVISOLAR project is mapping the amount of sunlight received around the globe. Solar radiation data is useful not only for solar energy generation, but also for agriculture, tourism, and even health care (rickets, skin cancer). Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Wired’s article on Google Earth examines a heretofore overlooked feature: “Google Earth’s true special sauce is the way it allows users to create markers for just about any venue or location, write a note describing it and then share it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has halted downloads of Google Earth for now; it seems that their plan was to limit the number of users of the new, beta service. It’s something they’ve done before with betas — think Gmail — and is probably…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sprol is a relatively new blog that uses satellite imagery to draw attention to the effects of environmental predation. Via MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth is out. Requires a fast Windows PC. Three subscription levels, the basic one free. More once I’ve had a chance to look through the site; post your take in the comments. Via Google Blog. See previous entries: Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Pyramids, uploaded by Alison Biggs. Scavengeroogle and WorldChanging are among those who’ve discovered that Google Maps’s satellite imagery for the rest of the world just got a lot more detailed, with high-resolution images available for a number of cities and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The USGS uses satellite imagery to trace the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It’s good for showing the topography, but the subsequent development and cultivation, particularly east of the Rockies, shatters the illusion somewhat. Via Gadling….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new atlas announced Saturday by the UN, titled One Planet, Many People, shows the impact of the last 30 years of human development in a dramatic way, by showing before and after satellite photography of various locations. Sample images…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps Wallpapers is another hack (see previous entry) allowing you to build wallpapers — think posters or desktop backgrounds — from Google Maps satellite images. Via MAKE: Blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Stephen DesRoches downloaded a beta of the upcoming Google Earth (see previous entry) the other day, and has a report and screenshots. Looks impressive. Update: See also Windypundit (via MAKE: Blog)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tony has written up a Perl script to take the data from his GPS watch and overlaid it on orthographic imagery from the USGS. These are ridiculously huge and detailed files, but the end result is an extremely precise map…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Microsoft’s response to Google Maps comes in the form of MSN Virtual Earth, which was announced yesterday at the D: All Things Digital conference and will debut for real some time this summer. The key feature is the service’s “oblique”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As, I guess, a challenge to himself, Casey Chestnut went and made a Pocket PC version of NASA World Wind (see previous entry), porting its basic functionality. Also via MAKE: Blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yet another riff on Google Maps on Flickr: the Feel Small Project, wherein participants take screenshots of their location on Google Maps satellite imagery at every zoom level, then build a slideshow that zooms from the tightest to the widest…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Since its launch a little less than three months ago, Google Maps has generated more buzz than any other mapping site since I’ve been paying attention to them. Adding satellite photos only made it worse. That buzz can be measured…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nothing you haven’t already seen before, but this BBC story briefly covers the recent excitement over the Google Maps satellite stuff, including Memory Maps (see previous entry) and Google Sightseeing (see previous entry)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

DigitalGlobe’s Vatican Gallery, including a satellite shot of St. Peter’s square on April 5 (1.5 MB JPEG, 2168×2164 resolution), showing mourners in line to view the Pope’s body. Via Jason….  •  Continue reading this entry.

As I said in my brief entry about NASA World Wind last November, my lack of access to a Windows PC — at least one I can install big software packages on — prevented me from checking it out. Manuel…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been saving up a bunch of Google Maps satellite imagery links for you over the weekend. Google Maps and Accountability: Dave Shea explores the possibilities of using Google Maps as a tool for whistleblowing rather than a threat to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Flickr users have gone nuts with posting screenshots of Google Maps’s new satellite photo feature (see previous entry), if the “map” and “maps” tags are any indication. There’s also a new Flickr group called Memory Maps, the idea of which…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps has added satellite images to its service as of late Monday, and it’s done so in a really useful manner: one click toggles between maps and satellite photography. Try zooming in without your jaw hitting the floor. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Aerial photography of Dubai, which is apparently in the midst of a beggar-the-imagination construction boom. Via Things Magazine; see MetaFilter (1, 2) for background….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of links tonight; the tenuous connection is that they both have to do with the weather and satellite imagery. I’ve never heard of Software MacKiev before, but they appear to do educational software for the Mac. They’ve released…  •  Continue reading this entry.

(Questions are coming in fast and furious here at The Map Room; I’m afraid I’ll have to be selective. This little experiment is working far better than I had expected.) Rocco Cammarota writes, “Can I get a map (aerial view)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More on the Indian Ocean tsunami. The NOAA has a page of images that show the height of the tsunami wave as it progressed (and expanded) over time, using data collected from radar satellites. There’s also an animation of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A collection of satellite photos showing areas of Sri Lanka and Indonesia before and after they were devastated by the tsunami. The photos from the Banda Aceh region are particularly horrifying. Via Rebecca’s Pocket. Tsunami Relief….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Joel takes a look at a couple of software packages that do neat things with satellite imagery: Keyhole, which was taken over by Google a while back; and NASA World Wind. They’re Windows-only, so I can’t try them out —…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The World Sunlight Map is a neat trick: it shows which parts of the Earth are currently in daylight and which are in darkness. It’s a simulation that begins with composite images of the Earth by day (sans clouds) and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of satellite-imagery links from Plep; I don’t think I’ve seen these before. Satellite Images of Earth at Night, from the International Dark-Sky Association. Usually you see night maps of the entire planet (e.g. see previous entry: APOD: The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MultiMap uses JavaScript to toggle between maps and satellite images of a given locale. One of a part of London has been making the rounds of the blogosphere this week (see Boing Boing and MetaFilter)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

SatBlog is a blog about satellite imagery; since its restart last August it’s been focusing mainly on the Middle East (especially Iraq) and on all those bloody hurricanes. A lot of news stories can be illuminated by satellite photography —…  •  Continue reading this entry.

La terre vue du ciel is a collection of aerial photography. The photos are uncaptioned and unattributed: you pretty much have to guess what they are, where they’re from and from what altitude they were taken. Via Making Light….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was a composite photograph of the Earth at night, replete with all the lights you’d expect. High-resolution versions also available. Via Slashdot….  •  Continue reading this entry.

For you Tube map freaks: R. Gardiner has taken a geographically accurate map of the London Underground and superimposed it on a satellite image of the city. Very effective. Via Here Be Dragons….  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’re into maps, then you’re also probably the sort of person who, when flying, asks for a window seat and does nothing but stare out the window for the duration of the trip. Though I frequently ask for an…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Satellite images of Ryongchong, North Korea, before and after the explosion (via MetaFilter)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Space Imaging presents what they call the top ten Ikonos satellite images for 2003 (via MetaFilter). And there’s some more neat stuff in their gallery (also via MetaFilter)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

SpaceDaily reports that NASA has released data covering Eurasia from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). [T]he new digital elevation data set showcases some of Earth’s most diverse, mysterious and extreme topography. Much of it previously had been very poorly…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is a little dated now for breaking news; I was saving it during the downtime. But still relevant: one-metre-resolution satellite images of Bam, Iran, after the earthquake. Via Here Be Dragons….  •  Continue reading this entry.