New Google Earth capabilities empower professionals and explorers
By Bryan Horowitz and Julian Helguero-Kelley, Google Earth Product Managers
For nearly two decades, Google Earth has connected people to our planet. It’s a real-world canvas for exploration, a tool for planning, and a platform for understanding our changing world. And now, it’s getting even better. Last year we announced updates to Google Earth to make geospatial work and collaboration across teams and devices easier. In the coming weeks, we’re launching new capabilities that make it easier for professionals like you to manage and share your data and projects. We’re also giving you access to historical imagery, improved satellite imagery and abstract basemaps for enhanced visualization capabilities in your projects
Easier to manage your data and projects, and collaborate
With so many capabilities in Google Earth, we’ve heard professionals like you ask for ways to make it easier to manage and share your work. In the coming weeks, if you’re signed-in you’ll see all your projects in Google Earth, right from a new home screen, so it’s easier to organize and find your work and share it with others. Now you can organize your data by copying and pasting polygons, lines, points and tile overlays across your projects in Google Earth web, as well as from Earth Pro to Earth for Web. You can also turn on the reference projects layer to overlay data from your existing projects. The new home screen also makes it easier for you to collaborate with teammates on a project, or allow an external partner to view a project by sharing via Google Drive.
And if you’re a Google Earth user who simply wants to explore the world, you can click the “Explore Earth” button to begin virtually traveling to any corner of the globe, just like you always have.
You can also now utilize Google’s cloud-based data import and storage to easily add your own KML datasets, such as parcel maps, proposed solar installations or ongoing wildlife management projects, into existing projects for visualization and analysis. This lets you import datasets and imagery to analyze data within the map’s context. You can then explore areas for conservation, protection, restoration, or development; inform decisions; and collaborate with stakeholders on recommendations.
Enhanced visualization for analysis and presentation
Historical Imagery
Google Earth now includes a number of new data visualization features that enable you to do deeper analysis and to enhance storytelling. One of the most common requests we’ve received from users is to bring the powerful historical imagery capabilities of Earth Pro to Earth on Web. Soon, you can access historical imagery on web and mobile for the first time, with access to global satellite imagery since 1984, and aerial imagery from as early as the 1930s for some cities. Historical imagery can help you understand how a developing neighborhood has changed over the years, visualize the impact to an area caused by a fire, earthquake or hurricane, or better understand climate and weather trends in places over time, like whether an area is prone to flooding or vegetation overgrowth.
Abstract Basemaps
Google Earth combines aerial photography, satellite imagery, 3D topography, geographic data, and Street View into a real-world canvas. Starting today, you can also now access abstract basemaps, which enable cleaner visualization for analysis and presentation, helping you and your stakeholders to more easily view and focus on the data that matters. And you can easily transition between different map types, such as abstract to photorealistic, or 2D maps to 3D maps.
Fresher, higher quality satellite imagery
In addition to historical imagery and abstract basemaps, Google Earth now includes a fresher, more beautiful cloud-free mosaic of the world. The technology now offers higher-resolution and higher quality imagery for the first 10 zoom levels, from the European Space Agency/European Commission Sentinel-2 constellation and USGS/NASA Landsat 8 and 9 satellites.
This is our most detailed global mosaic, thanks to the powerful AI advancements behind the Google Earth Engine team’s Cloud Score+ AI model, which is trained on millions of images to recognize and remove things like clouds, cloud shadows, haze and mist. At the same time, this model keeps real-world weather patterns — like ice, snow and mountain shadows — visible on the map. For more information on our updated satellite imagery and new Street View imagery in Google Earth, read our Keyword blog.
In a world facing increasingly urgent climate challenges, no-code tools with global satellite imagery and comprehensive geospatial data such as Google Earth are proving indispensable to help sustainability professionals and consumers to understand, mitigate and adapt to environmental impacts. We’re excited to introduce these new capabilities — you can visit Google Earth in the upcoming weeks to try them out.
