Data from several agencies is giving the public a bird’s eye view of their communities and the development that has occurred over more than 30 years.
The Google Timelapse feature shows Langley and some neighouring lands. The viewer can move the area to view and get closer up as well. The speed can also be adjusted.
Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 32 years, Google says. It is made from 33 cloud-free annual mosaics, one for each year from 1984 to 2016, which are made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab’s Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.
Using Earth Engine, Google combined over five million satellite images acquired over the past three decades by five different satellites. The majority of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program that has observed the Earth since the 1970s. For 2015 and 2016, Google combined Landsat 8 imagery with imagery from Sentinel-2A, part of the European Commission and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program.
