The Copernicus-2A satellite imaged the smoke plume and lava flow from the eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano near Grindavík, Iceland yesterday; Marco Langbroek processed natural-colour and short-wave infrared imagery to achieve the above image, which he posted to Bluesky. [Kottke]

Previously: Earthquake Swarms and an Imminent Eruption in Iceland.

NASA Earth Observatory has before-and-after satellite imagery showing the impact of the destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam last month. The Kakhovka Reservoir is emptying out (above), the irrigation canals that relied on that reservoir are drying out, and there was flooding downriver of the dam in the immediate aftermath of the breach.

Satellite observations have made it possible to evaluate the success of Ukraine’s wheat and barley harvest, even in active war zones or occupied territories. NASA Earth Observatory reports that the harvest was, in the end, larger than expected: “At the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, some analysts cautioned that 20 to 30 percent of Ukraine’s winter crops might not be harvested at the end of the summer. However, NASA Harvest’s analysis indicates that 94 percent of the winter crop was harvested, including 88 percent of winter crops in areas not controlled by Ukraine.”

When the invasion of Ukraine started, these images started popping up on social media and in the news so often that it seems like most of us have access to advanced satellite imagery intelligence in real time. […] But the role of commercial providers in acquiring and sharing so many images with such regularity is unprecedented. Their rise has made military-grade intelligence available to pretty much everyone who wishes to look into it.

What’s notable is that because the satellites are commercial, the images aren’t classified.

More on the question of whether theatre maps accurately reflect the ground situation. Nathan Ruser’s maps have been used to argue that Russian forces are controlling roads rather than territory, but Ruser complains that his maps are being misinterpreted: they were never meant to show territorial control, just troop movements. See also this Twitter thread from Jennifer Cafarella, in which she explains the methodology and reasoning behind her team’s maps.

3D models of bombing damage.† Satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetric data are used to create 3D models of bombing damage in Ukraine. [Maps Mania]

A map of attacks on civilian targets† with photo and video documentation. [Nataliya Gumenyuk]

Where hot spots are literally hot spots. In a Twitter thread, Sotris Valkaniotis shows how military operations in Ukraine show up in Landsat spectral imagery: weapons fire turns up as hot spots showing “very high temperature in short-wave infrared band.”

A Ukrainian map of alleged Russian casualties† and where they were deployed from. [Michael Weiss]

A map of checkpoint traffic. More than two million Ukrainians have fled the Russian invasion. Overwhelmingly, they’re fleeing westward. This map shows how busy each border checkpoint is: Polish border crossings are extremely congested. [Kyiv Independent]

Meanwhile, Kenneth Field has been working on ways to map Ukraine’s refugees. Here’s his most recent iteration:

Update to my illustrative #Ukraine refugee map.

Adds more displaced grey dots to major populated areas.

Adds same stippled symbology to Russian incursion to indicate fuzziness of invasion (neither lines nor areas).#cartography #StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/QOyA8RaRi0

— Kenneth Field (@kennethfield) March 8, 2022

Ukraine’s population density. More than 41 million people live in Ukraine. This map from Airwars shows the population density per square kilometre. Which shows how many people in an area are affected by a particular military strike.

Apple says Crimea is Ukrainian. Mashable: “Apple’s Maps and Weather apps now mark Crimea as part of Ukraine when accessed outside of Russia. It appears the company has quietly updated its stance on the territorial dispute.” Apple had marked Crimea as Russian in 2019, which pissed Ukraine off at the time. [TechCrunch]

Finally, this striking bit of art:

By Ukrainian tattoo artist Eugene Anatsky pic.twitter.com/qVybeGYAuE

— Olga Tokariuk (@olgatokariuk) March 5, 2022

Previously: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, Before and After.

Erin Davis has created maps showing the average colour of each country of the world (plus  maps showing the average colour of each U.S. state and county). She derived the average colour from Sentinel-2 natural-colour satellite imagery; she appends the process and the code to the end of her post. [My Modern Met]

NASA Earth Observatory has had several stories on the western U.S. wildfires, gathered here. This story summarizes the situation; satellite images of the smoke generated by the fires can be seen here, here and here.

In today's Sunday edition of @washingtonpost pic.twitter.com/qHosujRKrG

— Lauren Tierney (@tierneyl) September 13, 2020

Marena Brinkhurst of Mapbox has a comprehensive list of open data sources relating to the wildfires, smoke, and air quality.

Mark Altaweel at GIS Lounge looks at how GIS is being used to map wildfires, smoke and air pollution.

Previously: California Wildfires, 2020 Edition.

The New York Times uses the colours in aerial images as a proxy for political leanings: rather than red-and-blue electoral maps, the political landscape, Tim Wallace and Krishna Karra argue, is more green and gray.

The pattern we observe here is consistent with the urban-rural divide we’re accustomed to seeing on traditional maps of election results. What spans the divide—the suburbs represented by transition colors—can be crucial to winning elections. […] At each extreme of the political spectrum, the most Democratic areas tend to be heavily developed, while the most Republican areas are a more varied mix: not only suburbs, but farms and forests, as well as lands dominated by rock, sand or clay.

This is a generalization, to be sure, but so are most political maps, and the notion that urban areas tend to vote Democratic while rural areas tend to vote Republican isn’t what I’d call a revelation. Still.

Blurring or removing map data to prevent people from seeing something important or sensitive is a pretty loud signal that there’s something important or sensitive to see there. Some five million Baidu Maps tiles were masked in Xinjiang alone—there’s a lot the Chinese government considers sensitive—which made the unmasking considerably harder. But not impossible.

NASA has released a map of the likely extent of damage from Tuesday’s explosion in Beirut.

Synthetic aperture radar data from space shows ground surface changes from before and after a major event like an earthquake. In this case, it is being used to show the devastating result of an explosion.

On the map, dark red pixels—like those present at and around the Port of Beirut—represent the most severe damage. Areas in orange are moderately damaged and areas in yellow are likely to have sustained somewhat less damage. Each colored pixel represents an area of 30 meters (33 yards).

The map is based on data from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel program, and was analyzed by NASA’s Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis team and the Earth Observatory of Singapore.

nepal-sikkim in 1975 by glaciers on Sketchfab

Satellite imagery only goes back so far. To measure the rate of ice loss across the Himalayan glaciers, researchers turned to recently declassified spy satellite photos from 1975. The photos were used to create a digital elevation model (above) which was compared with more recent data. They concluded that the rate of ice loss was accelerating: it was twice as much from 2000 to 2016 than it was from 1975 to 2000. Columbia University, Science News. [Geography Realm]

Here’s a silly Google Maps origin story about how “Satellite” was almost named “Bird Mode” pic.twitter.com/wj7CRJUEyx

— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) February 23, 2019

A lot of what we refer to on online maps as “satellite imagery” actually isn’t: the high-resolution stuff is usually taken from airplanes. This can be a point of confusion for some—and, according to this Twitter thread from Google Maps co-creator Bret Taylor, also a point of contention for the Google Maps team before it launched. Some engineers felt that calling the layer “Satellite” was factually incorrect—because of that aerial imagery—and therefore shouldn’t be used; others argued for “Satellite” based on label size and usability studies. It nearly got called “Bird Mode” as a compromise. [Boing Boing]

So you would like to use a satellite image in your article and you would like to explain it to your viewers? Here is a short guide covering some of the most frequently asked questions and giving some general explanations on satellite images. It by no means covers all aspects, as there are far too many types of satellite images, but should give you a good start to find out more on your own and maybe motivate you to create your own images, which has become quite easy and quick even with no prior knowledge of it.

Complete with examples of imagery, examples of how to use it properly, and links to resources.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s 2018 California Fire Tracker is an interactive map of ongoing and contained wildfires—notably, at this moment, the Camp and Woolsey fires. It includes fire perimeter and air quality data. (Note: it’s glitchy on desktop Safari.)

Two Esri maps: a general wildfire map and a map of smoke from wildfires [Maps Mania]. Add to that a map of field damage reports in the area hit by the Camp Fire [Maps Mania].

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has produced a map of the damage from the Camp Fire based on satellite radar images. NASA Earth Observatory has maps and animations showing the impact of the Camp Fire on air quality and satellite images of the Woolsey Fire burn scar.

The New York Times has a map tracking air quality in California. Smoke from the fires has reached the east coast: an outcome predicted by atmospheric models (see above map).

This interactive map from NBC News that superimposes the Camp Fire on any location to help people outside California get a sense of how big these fires are. [Maps Mania]

NASA Earth Observatory published a Landsat 8 image, dated 8 November, of the massive Camp Fire in northern California. Meanwhile, Maps Mania links to several California wildfire-related maps and resources.

Last week a magnitude-7.5 earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, triggering a tsunami that struck the city of Palu with far more force than expected. The New York Times has multiple maps and aerial images of the damaged areas; NASA Earth Observatory has before-and-after Landsat imagery.

Smoke from the British Columbia wildfires (previously) has blanketed the Canadian prairie provinces and can be seen from space, CBC News reports. The above image was taken by the Suomi NPP satellite on 15 August.

Landsat observations have charted the erosion of the banks of the ever-changing Padma River, a major distributary of the Ganges in Bangladesh. This is vividly shown in this animation produced by NASA Earth Observatory, which “shows 14 false-color images of the Padma river between 1988 and 2018 taken by the Landsat 5 and 8 satellites. All of the images include a combination of shortwave infrared, near infrared, and visible light to highlight differences between land and water.” More on the erosion of the Padma River here.

The Washington Post maps the largest of the wildfires burning in northern California: the Carr Fire threatening the city of Redding and surrounding communities. The Redding Record Searchlight has drone footage of the destruction wreaked by the Carr Fire in Shasta County. NASA has natural and false-colour imagery (Earth Observatory, Visible Earth) of the Carr Fire, as well as the Ranch and River Fires to the south, the so-called Mendocino Complex. See the Mercury News’s fire map of the Mendocino Complex, whose two fires’ combined acreage is now larger than the Carr Fire. Meanwhile, German astronaut Alexander Gerst observed the California wildfires from the International Space Station. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Meanwhile, the Copernicus program captured images of wildfires in Sweden last month.