Google introduced a significant update to Google Maps in June, which brought massive amounts of new imagery data to the service. Now, Google has used the same techniques to improve Earth Timelapse, its “zoomable” creation for viewing Earth over space and time. This latest increment adds four years of imagery data to timelapses and shows data from 1984 all the way to present day.
Google says that it went through about three quadrillion pixels from more than 5 million satellite images for the update. Data was generated from the Landsat Global Archive Consolidation Program as well as from two new satellites, Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2.
Chris Herwig, program manager for Google Earth engine, explained in a post, "We took the best of all those pixels to create 33 images of the entire planet, one for each year. We then encoded these new 3.95 terapixel global images into just over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles.” He also said that the project leverages Carnegie Mellon CREATE Lab's Time Machine library to make the data "explorable."
The clip above shows how the Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco has changed from 1984 to 2016 and is just one of the many examples available on the Earth Outreach’s YouTube channel.
Those interested can check out the update on the Earth Engine website or on desktop via Earth's historical imagery feature starting today.
Source: Google Blog
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