Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

A little late in getting this out, but Google announced late-June updates to imagery in Google Earth. This is significant for a several reasons (and their post is worth reading):

1. Landsat 8: the base imagery they Google fall back to if no high res aerial imagery is available is now Landsat 8. Previously it was Landsat 7. Google need moderately up-to-date imagery but the Landsat 7 partial failure meant a slower process for acquiring global imagery. With enough global data in the back pocket, they can now switch to the newer sensor.

2. Google Earth Engine: Google’s cloud based image processing service is used to process the imagery. This leverages huge online image archives and processing power to allow very fast MASSIVE processing. So, in this case, for every pixel across the whole planet, using every available Landsat 8 image, select the one with the lowest cloud cover. Very neat way to create a global cloud free image. Or to put it in their marketing speak:

Like our previous mosaic, we mined data from nearly a petabyte of Landsat imagery-that’s more than 700 trillion individual pixels-to choose the best cloud-free pixels. To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 7,000 times more pixels than the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, or 70 times more pixels than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe.

3. The Verge: just to show how mainstream this is, even The Verge picked up on it. Remote sensing is joe bloggs interesting now!