The product we are launching today continues our freemium strategy – Global Base Map (#satmap). It’s available as a part of VANE platform and opens the easiest way to start working with satellite imagery and connect it to your own application. You can choose from a number of presets that provides imagery in a way most fitting for your project. And as a result you get the tile URL to connect maps to your client apps with the instant access.
Get your #satmap at owm.io/sat
The product remains free for open satellite imagery and will be extended with commercial satellites with higher resolution and cadence.
The free for all “VANE Global Map” constituted of middle resolution Landsat and Sentinel imagery – still continuously updated as new imagery become available. To make a global mosaic we applied special color processing algorithms for both of the imagery data sets, thus it can be used in one single layer as opposed to Landsat-only or Sentinel-only mosaics.
And for low-zoom levels (1-5) – to observe Earth on a daily or hourly time basis – we added low resolution imagery from Aqua and Terra satellites that can be vividly combined with weather layers – previously we posted about this part of the work on our blog. We process MODIS imagery in minimum time as for Web Mercator based apps – which means you can get tiles directly in any popular mapping library from Google Maps to Leaflet. The delay between satellite overpass and the publishing on our server is about 2 hours, yet we look forward to reducing this time. About every 30 minutes new imagery comes from each of satellites.
What could be even more fascinating about Global Satellite Map – you get it not only in one RGB state (that is quite usual as we get used to web-mapping services) or not only in the provided number of presets but with all capabilities that are brought to you by the power of VANE Language – select, order, combine, apply colors and more.
For example, developers of farm management applications can get a vegetation map (so called NDVI) from the same base map and calculate NDVI values to detect the amount and healthiness of a vegetation and compare it’s dynamics for the certain area of interest.
To learn more about what you can get from multispectral satellite imagery – we are going to start workouts section. Don’t hesitate to share your results with the others. Let’s use hashtag #satmap to facilitate the sharing.
The default view of the map is provided in “True color” rendering and the imagery tiles are automatically sorted in the best order and combined into one single tile layer. This means that each tile is selected according to the best fit for the summary of the recentness, cloudiness and some additional characteristics. Note that this is a beta version and we are in the process of adding more imagery into our database to improve these algorithms.
To start using API from third-party applications and to get tiles from the server you need to generate an {API key} – you can sign in under your Openweathermap account or create a new one. Then the Map can be used in a vast range of clients from GIS desktops to web-mapping libraries (see more detailed description and examples at http://owm.io/sat).
About company
OpenWeatherMap is a technological company with a unique combination of expertise in Big Data and in environmental data processing. Main product is VANE platform http://owm.io that processes weather data, satellite images along with other environmental data, and provides data feeds, maps, and analytical products via online tools and APIs. More than 600,000 use products on the VANE platform and around 1,000 new users are join every day. Users get simple, intuitive instruments for working with weather and satellite images that let them create new applications or get immediate insight from data straightaway.