Switch Google Maps to satellite view over Bangladesh in July and much of what you see is white. Satellites photograph through cloud no better than you do, and a place under monsoon skies for four months a year has been, in the satellite layer, a place under permanent cloud. This week Google said it has fixed that with a model called Cloud Score+, which now runs across the satellite imagery in Maps and removes cloud, haze, mist and smoke automatically.
How it works
Cloud Score+ was built by Google Earth Engine, the company’s research platform for satellite data, and trained on imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites. It scores every pixel for how clear it is, and the Maps team uses those scores to stitch each location from the clearest passes available rather than the most recent one. The result is not a fake — no pixel is invented — but a composite of real, cloud-free moments. The imagery is also fresher: many regions now show scenes from the past year rather than several years old.
Google Earth goes back in time
The larger change is in Google Earth, which gains Historical Imagery on both the web and the mobile apps. Pick a place, open the time slider, and step back through the archive — satellite imagery to the 1980s for most of the world, and aerial photographs back to the 1930s for cities such as London, Berlin and San Francisco. The feature was previously available only in the Google Earth Pro desktop program; putting it on a phone makes it a tool for anyone.
Street View
Street View’s virtual tours extend to new countries and territories, and Google has refreshed imagery in Argentina, France, Japan, Mexico and South Africa. Bangladesh’s Street View coverage, which began with Dhaka in 2013 and has barely grown since, is not on the list.
Why it matters here
Bangladesh is the country the time slider was made for. The delta rewrites itself every year: chars appear and vanish in the Jamuna, the Meghna eats villages, the Sundarbans retreat, Dhaka’s wetlands turn into housing. Until now, seeing that on a phone required someone else to have made the comparison. With Historical Imagery any student, journalist or land-office clerk can drag a slider from 1990 to 2024 over their own union and watch the river move. And with the clouds gone, the current satellite layer finally shows the country as it is, rather than as a weather map. The features are rolling out in stages to all countries.
Source: India Today, via Prothom Alo.
