Recently, changes have been made in the Whistler Area on Google Earth. Large sections of Northern Garibaldi Park have been replaced with winter snowcover photos. This has the disadvantage of very high contrast levels and continuous snowcover, which makes planning summer traverses much more difficult.

I have no idea whether this is a short-term change or what the rationale is. Anyone else noted similar changes in other areas? Higher resolutions have been added to Duffey Lake areas, but these are summer images...

Are you talking about the new shots of Whistler backcountry and Helm area that have a green tinge? From what I remember, those shots replaced very low resolution imagery... Garibaldi Lake area was always snow covered (I agree, difficult to pick out terrain features). Whistler townsite itself I think is plane-based photos, not satellite imagery.

-Ryan

This also applies to the Chehalis peaks area north and east of Stave Lake and has been that way for a year or more . The image date is Mar. 29/2006 and though the resolution is high the snowpack obscures a lot of detail .

Wulf

Ryan, there are more areas covered in snow now than before in the Whistler area. While the images do have higher resolution, for planning backpacking trips and scrambling, it is impossible to determine what rock features exist under the snow. In addition, determining the location of slide alder patches and the like is impossible.

It's true that the poor resolution in earlier images lacked detail, but it was still possible to determine vegetation patterns, rock ribs, and the like.

I found they did the same thing with a large area of Jasper National Park, it's very frustrating.

I have an old colleague that now works in geoinformatics (or something of that nature). We've chatted a few times about google earth. Word from the inside is that an upcoming feature (not sure how far out this is) will be map images selectable by the month and will start being catalogued so in future you can look back on previous months/years. I would find this an incredible feature to compare snowpack changes, certainly would aid in routeplanning by looking at imagery from the month you plan to travel in (likely 1 year behind).

You've been able to look back in time at previous imagery for a while now, in Google Earth.

I've heard you can do it also, in fact on the news they were saying you can look at the comparison over time with greenland and the difference in amount of ice over time.

Very cool! Thanks, I never bothered looking for this feature.

It's just along the top, the clock icon.

The sun icon is pretty neat too, would be very beneficial for photographers trying to figure out good sunrise spots.

Thanks stillgoing, it's useful to know that feature is there. Now if we can just get some high resolution summer photos for the Garibaldi area!

New Imagery Alert!

Lots of new hi-res imagery in Sea-to-sky corridor, looks like April 2009 time frame so there is still lots of snow cover.

Neat, glad they are improving the resolution.

K