By now, Google Earth maintained SPOT images only as a way of catalog, viewed when clicking on the “other, Spot Image” option.
This enables a grid of the existing different shots and when seeing the properties of the ball we can see conditions and characteristics of the data.
The bad
This was just a catalog; it could not be shown on the globe, what remained was to select the image type, coverage and payment. After having the image could not be loaded from Google Earth in a geo-referenced way.
The good
However it has already been announced that it exists the availability of the last 3 years SPOT images service from Google Earth “ready for Google Earth”. The example shows the fires in California.
With this service, the images are served by a kml that address the “ready for Google Earth” coverage or in DIMAP GeoTIFF format
The images will be available between 6 and 8 hours after capture, which allows you can see a satellite image of the previous day, it can also be requested for download via FTP or copy on DVD.
The ugly
Only for Google Earth Enterprise users, as we know, the different licenses of this tool are:
Free Google Earth, Google Earth Plus ($20 annual), Google Earth Pro ($400) and Google Earth Enterprise Client… for which not many people have interest in knowing the price but in this post we talked about various functionalities that can be achieved by version.
What’s next
While it is not a step that emotion to all of us, it is an interesting step to what we have long been waiting for: A functionality whereby can be created an image georeference towards Google Earth to create from the outside; it’s clear that it would be better that Google will implement the ability to read the standards that already have existing formats (ecw, tiff, jpg2000, img and others) as are done by other GIS applications
We also expect this to happen from next year with GeoEye, and there we would have much interest.