Real time imagery of significant geophysical and weather events would be of
significant interest.

Having an overlay feature of the volcanic MODIS imagery from the
Aqua and Terra satellites would be of great benefit.

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Indeed these are basemap layers (albeit not at a high resolution). However, it does provide almost realtime access to largescale events (forest fires, volcano ash plumes, oil spills etc). 

The 116 stars arise because there are many people who believe in (almost) realtime imagery and who are disappointed that the OnEarth JPL server no longer serves this data.

A solution to this could be to create an ImageMapType when you load the application.  The past few days I've been prototyping some stuff for work where I can give it a WMS server url (Nexrad Radar and NASA Landsat in my case) and then using the getTileUrl function I figure out the bounding box of the tile and add that onto the WMS call.

It's not a true base map solution, but as long as you have a wms server to call, you can build your own custom map from the functionality already provided.

Another example of stunning imagery from these sensors that impact the news:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44991

This is of the devastation in Pakistan. 

Another image from these sensors -- this time showing the flooding from the Mississippi

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=50659

Come on Google.

This would be a very useful feature and interesting

Would have been handy for flood maps in Japan after the earthquake for directing aid, and certainly there will be many more severe floods as sea level rise coupled with more severe weather comes to dominate our not-so-distant future.

This is another example of the imagery: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/special/environment/eng/siberian-wildfires-light-up-u_s_-west-coast.html

Turns out that wildfires in Siberia are causing beautiful sunsets on the US West Coast. Maybe someone at Google will look at the sunset visible from Mountain View and wonder why? Maybe that curious question will trigger the itch that could be scratched by supporting the Aqua/Terra image data layers.....

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This would be a very useful feature

With the fires in California maybe going to impact San Francisco's power supply, it would be nice to be able to see images like:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=81919 (Yosemite Fire)

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=Australia.A2013299.0345.250m.jpg

Fires in western australia.... (view from Aqua satellite)

Thanks for the suggestion. We have discussed this within the team and although we agree it's a cool idea, providing this imagery is not currently on our roadmap.

Wow.  After almost 5 years, it's interesting to get an acknowledgement, so thanks for that.
I sort of expected something other than "it's not on the roadmap", which was pretty obvious, and of course the hope of many rescue workers, and other emergency service providers would be that it could be PUT on the roadmap.

This request could save lives, I think that's worth more than many other features that are on the roadmap.

Google did that for Katrina.  I suspect it is very hard to get good real-time overlay to the Google map universe without a lot of manual tweaking.  They never said how they did it.  They probably also have to pay for real time feed.

This data is freely available from NASA. The problem with providing it to users is the amount of data that needs to be transferred. JPL used to provide this, but it overloaded their systems (due to popularity). I suspect that Google has sufficient processing/bandwidth to make this work reliably. 

Nasa provides free near-realtime KML files:
https://earthdata.nasa.gov/data/near-real-time-data/firms/active-fire-data

The global 24 hour KML file is too large (too many points in the past 24 hours) to load. 

I tried putting all of the individual area KML links in a new KML file as folder network links and referencing that KML file, but they still wouldn't load even though I received an 'Ok' status.

The way I got them all to load was to load each one of the area KML files separately as its own KML layer. When the user toggles the fire layer, each one of the KML layers is turned on or off instead of the one global layer.

The world is on fire!

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<thumbsup>

Another data source for the US only is the USFS: http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/imagery.php  ... I use that daily when there are fires in the area here, which is often.

It's well-processed and available for download, but is not EPSG:3857.

Warping and tiling the USFS rasters is likely less processing than the source.

VIIRS data is also available, for both day and night.  US-only day products are at the above link.

Google is *already providing* night DMSP global radiance products on maps.google.com, though not to the Gmaps API. and just the cloud-free static product from 2006 or whatever.  Old rasters are old.

VIIRS is higher resolution than DMSP, more sensitive (eg prettier "earth at night") and is updated at least daily on the NOAA's site.  Unlike DMSP's image intensifiers, VIIRS does not suffer bloom if there's moonlight, so far more of the products are viable.

tl;dr: You can make users happy and improve what you're already doing at the same time.

You'll have to update the DMSP (earth at night) raster on maps.google.com eventually.

Why not make a reusable workflow when you do so that works with both MODIS and VIIRS?

[email protected]

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