Google Earth Library

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology has numerous global overlays available that can be viewed with Google Earth. These overlays are on WMS servers, which can be a little tricky to set up in Google Earth, so I have done the hard part and all you have to do is download the file below the screenshot to access all of them. This following layers are included:

1990 Land Characteristics – The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC) layer covers the continental United States and shows general land characteristics from 1990. This overlay is available in eight different formats (real color, pseudo-color, red band, etc.)

Landsat7 Global Mosaic - The Landsat7 layer covers the entire Earth and shows a mosaic of imagery obtained from the Landsat7 satellite. I believe this imagery was probably obtained in the early 2000’s. This overlay is available in 15 different formats (real color, pseudo-color, Pan Sharpened, red band, thermal band, etc.)

Blue Marble Next Generation Global Mosaic - The Blue Marble layer covers the entire Earth and shows a mosaic of imagery obtained from the MODIS sensor on the Aqua and Terra satellites. I believe this imagery was probably obtained in the mid 2000’s. There are separate mosaics for each month of the year and also various other options, such as the ability to view the mosaics with or without bathymetry shading.

SRTM Reflectance - The SRTM Reflectance layer covers the entire Earth and shows data collected by the Space Shuttle in 2000. This data was used to generate a highly accurate elevation grid of the Earth. There are separate mosaics for each of the four subswaths and and an average. In addition, a 90 meter SRTM Derived Elevation Model is included.

National Elevation Dataset (NED)- The National Elevation Dataset layer covers the continental United States and shows a grey scale elevation map. 30 meter and 90 meter versions of the overlays are provided.

MODIS Dailey Planet - The Dailey Planet layer covers the entire Earth and shows a continuously updated mosaic of imagery obtained from the MODIS sensor on the Aqua and Terra satellites. I believe the age of this imagery is typically less than 24 hours old with the Terra imagery from the morning and Aqua imagery from the afternoon.

Much more information about each of these layers is available at the OnEarth website

Credits Google Earth Library See above descriptions

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• MODIS Today
• MODIS Satellite Gallery
• 3Dsolar Addons
• World Fires in Real Time from FIRMS
• TerraLook Archive

The MODIS sensor on the Aqua and Terra satellites capture amazingly detailed natural color imagery every day from all over the Earth. The imagery is detailed enough that you can easily see cloud formations, snow coverage, smoke from large fires, etc, for the entire US. And the best part is the imagery from these satellites is available in almost real time and is typically online within a few hours of it being captured. There are several MODIS datasets available for viewing within Google Earth.

MODIS Today:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center has created MODIS Today, a repository of MODIS imagery for the Continental United States that updates every day. In addition to the current MODIS imagery, about 2 years of historical imagery is also available online from the MODIS Today website making it possible to watch storms and other meteorological events as they progress from one day to the next. They have made the imagery available in Google Earth format (just look for the Open in Google Earth link at the top of their web site).

OR……I have created an easy to use index that includes the current (Today’s) imagery and all of the historical imagery (through 12/13/2009), which can be accessed directly from Google Earth. Just download the file below the screenshot to access the imagery via this method. Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to updated the new links to the historical imagery every day, but I’ll try to do an update every few months.

The historical imagery is organized by Year and Day of the year. For example, a1.07324 is interpreted as the 324th day of 2007 from the Aqua satellite.

These are very high resolution SuperOverlays. They will increase in resolution as you zoom in, but might take a few seconds to load. Unfortunately, the SuperOverlays are not optimized very well, so they are a bit slower than they need to be. But the image quality is excellent nonetheless.

NASA/JPL OnEarth:

The NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology has created the OnEarth website, which contains numerous global imagery overlays. One of these overlays is the DailyPlanet, which is a continuously updated near real-time overlay of imagery from the MODIS Terra satellite. This overlay covers the entire Earth and is updated as new imagery becomes available from the satellite.

Credits Google Earth Library MODIS Today OnEarth website NASA MODIS Satellites

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• 3Dsolar Addons
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• OnEarth WMS
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The collection contains over 2,200 satellite images obtained from NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites overlaid onto Google Earth. These satellite capture excellent natural color imagery in amazing detail from all over the Earth. NASA posts some of the most interesting imagery collected from these satellites several times per week at the MODIS Gallery. NASA also has a MODIS Image of the Day web page, and a RSS Feed if you want to keep up on the daily postings.

The images typically show major events occurring in the world that are visible from space. Dust storms, hurricanes, tropical storms, volcanic eruptions and wildfires are just some of the events captured by the satellites.

One of the shortcomings of the NASA gallery is it lacks a nice user-friendly index for Google Earth. So that’s what I have created for this post. Simply download the KML file from beneath the screenshot and you will get an index sorted by year of all (well…almost all) the MODIS Gallery images from 2003 through 2009. Each image is represented by a placemark and description of the image. Click on the placemark, then click on the blue hyperlink in the pop-up balloon to load the image into Google Earth. Most of the images are around 1 to 5 megabytes, so it might take them a minute or two to load. If you get a Red X, that probably means the image was too large for your computer to download.

About 10% of the images were not indexed by NASA for Google Earth for various reasons (size of image, wrong projection, etc.), which unfortunately includes all imagery near the north and south poles. Also, the quality of the image as you see it in Google Earth might vary depending on how much video memory you have available since these are large JPG files and have not been tiled into SuperOverlays.

I will try to update the index a couple times per year.

Credits Google Earth Library MODIS Rapid Response Project at NASA/GSFC

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• World Fires in Real Time from FIRMS
• OnEarth WMS
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3D Solar is a great collection of several useful sets of data, including:

• MODIS Rapid Response System consists of near real time imagery captured by NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites.  New satellite images are released daily and they typically show something of interest, such as tropical storms, wildfires, volcanic ash plumes, and other large scale events that are visible from space.  The interface to load the images is a bit confusing.  You have to be careful not to try and load all of them at the same time.
• MODIS Terra & Aqua - These layers do not appear to work.
• USGS Ortho 1 meter - This layer will load black & white aerial photographs for the lower 48 United States.  These aerial photographs typically date from the mid to late 1990s.
• USGS Topo Maps -  This layer will load the USGS Topographic maps for all 50 United States.  The scale of the map decreases automatically as you zoom in.
• Landsat 7 IR1 - This appears to be a global mosaic of historical infrared satellite imagery from the Landsat7 satellite.
• US Navy Cloud Top - Global overlay of cloud imagery updated every three hours.

Credits http://www.3dsolar.com Google Earth BBS Forums

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• 2007 California Wildfires

This collection of placemarks shows near real time locations of active fires as identified by NASA’s MODIS satellite and the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) .  The data covers the entire globe and is updated every 2 hours.  Several other subsets of the data in KML format are available from the FIRMS website.

Credits NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) Google Earth Forums

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Global database created by the National Geophysical Data Center which shows the locations of historic natural hazards, including earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.  The database includes socioeconomic information (i.e. number of fatalities, injuries, and damage information) and scientific data (i.e. earthquake magnitudes, tsunami intensity) for hazard events dating back to before 2000 BC.  The data points are color coded to show the number of fatalities and each placemark contains a link to the NGDC’s online database, which contains additional details for each event.

Credits NGDC Natural Hazards Google Earth Forum

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• USGS Earthquake Hazards Program
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Update 11/2009

This archive of Hurricane Katrina data has been removed.  The aerial photographs of New Orleans shortly after the flooding can now be found using the historical imagery in Google Earth.  The MODIS satellite imagery of Katrina can still be found using the MODIS Satellite Gallery.  Much of the other data previously contained in this archive was hosted on other websites and is no longer available.

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• World Fires in Real Time from FIRMS
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• OnEarth WMS
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The Southern California wildfires of October/November 2007 destroyed over 1,500 homes and over 500,000 acres.  More information on the fire can be found at Wikipedia October 2007 California Wildfires.

This is an archive of various GIS data sets that were created during, and shortly after the fire and have been converted to be viewable with Google Earth. The following data sets are included:

• Daily MODIS Satellite imagery courtesy of MODIS Rapid Response Project at NASA/GSFC
• Time animation based on GOES West Satellite imagery collected every 30 minutes during the first several days of the fires.
• Data showing extent of fires from various sources
• Placemarks linking to georeferenced photographs from several sources

KML Content Created By Google Earth Library and Many Others

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