A month or so ago, the new ESA featured content layer in Google Earth left me a little underwhelmed: Placemarks with links to relatively old and low-res imagery on the web are so — how shall we put it — 2005. But today comes news of something much more impressive, with much more potential: MIRAVI (MERIS Images RApid VIsualization), a new website with near real-time images taken with ESA’s Envisat satellite, posted directly to the web for immediate download. There are at dozens of new images added every day, and they come with a full complement of scrapable metadata, including the coordinates of the edges… which means that all the necessary information is there to produce a KML network link with proper overlays of the latest data automatically. ESA should of course offer this (and perhaps they’re working on it), as it is clear synergetic addition to the site. But until ESA does it, is anyone game to have a go? That would definitely deserve “featured content” status in my book.

PS: Notice how cloudy it is in most places most of the time? It makes you realize how rare the imagery that ends up being used in Google Earth is.