Most Detailed Portraits of Earth Ever Created
Posted by Stephen Nodvin on May 11th, 2007The most detailed portraits ever of the Earth’s land surface have been created with ESA’s Envisat environmental satellite. The portraits are the first products produced as part of the ESA-initiated GlobCover project and are available online here.
Around 40 terabytes of imagery – an amount of data equivalent to the content of 40 million books – were acquired between December 2004 and June 2006 and processed to generate the global composites. The composites will support the international community in modelling climate change extent and impacts, studying ecosystems and plotting worldwide land-use trends.
The image above (click for larger size) is the GlobCover bimonthly global composite for May to June 2005 based on Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument working in Full Resolution Mode with a spatial resolution of 300 meters.