Average Earth from Space 2018
source link: https://hannes.enjoys.it/blog/2019/01/average-earth-from-space-2018/
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Average Earth from Space 2018
Due to popular request, I now provide a high-resolution, digital download as an experiment. Any profit from this will go towards bug-fixes in GDAL, the free and open-source software I used for this project.
I collected all the daily images of the satellite-based Soumi VIIRS sensor and calculated the per-pixel average over the whole year of 2018.
You can explore it in full resolution in an interactive webmap.
WGS84 / EquirectangularWeb Mercator
You can see fascinating patterns, e.g. “downstream” of islands in the ocean or following big rivers like the Amazon. Be wary though as snow and clouds look the same here.
- Bit of Europe
- Islands in the Atlantic Ocean
- North America
- Parts of South-East Asia
- Somewhere in Russia
- Around India
- Amazon
- Caribbean
- Around Madagascar
It’s also fun to look at the maximum to see cloudless regions (this image is highly exaggerated and does not make too much sense anyways):
Many thanks to Joshua Stevens for motivation and infos on data availability! The initial idea was of course inspired by Charlie ‘vruba’ Lyod‘s Cloudless atlas works. I explored imagery on https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/, grabbed Soumi VIIRS images via https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/GIBS/GIBS+API+for+Developers and processed it in GDAL. Poke me repeatedly to blog about the process please.
Full resolution, georeferenced imagery (12288×6144 resp. 8192×8192) in PNG available on request.
I said average but of course it is the median. The average or mean does not make much sense to use nor does it look any good. ;-)
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