OSINT At Home #9 – Top 4 Free Satellite Imagery Sources

[Music] hi everyone and welcome back to this series on how to do open source investigations from home i'm ben and this is part nine so let's get started [Music] in this session i really want to share with you my favorite free satellite imagery resources that i use what i like about sharing these resources with you is that no matter who you are or where you are in the world you can access them for no cost just like these tutorials that i'm making here and all you need is a computer and an internet connection to access them so let's get started with my favorite number one source for satellite imagery which is google earth and that's the desktop version not the web-based version for those of you that are more familiar with using google maps or with using google earth on the web-based version you'll notice there's a lot of similarities but when you download the google earth desktop version there are a huge amount of added extras that you've got this satellite image that you're seeing right here is of a village in nigeria's borno state in the north what's really interesting about google earth is that we can scroll backwards and forwards in time so for example if i scroll forwards from october 2014 to february february 2017 you can see that that village disappears and we can see a lot more of those on google earth as we go through in different areas what i really like about using google earth is the fact that we can actually save our pins on a map and get more of an understanding as to trends or things like that that might have occurred so for example this is just a little project that i've been working on where i'm mapping villages that were destroyed in nigeria's borno state between the 2014 2017 period and the only way we can really see them is if we scroll back in time on satellite imagery just like this one that we're seeing in this location here where this village was uh very much present and you can see that by the roofs you can see that by some of the changes that we can see in the village and then if we scroll through to 2017 2018 significant change with all the roofs destroyed or removed and then the place has grown over and subsequently we're just left with ruins in that place so this is one of the reasons why i really like google earth just to explain a little bit more about the availability of past satellite imagery if we go to a place like london uh in the uk we can also see just how far back we can go so the uk has available imagery on google earth right back to 1945 as we can see here and these are images that are taken of london uh from 1945 we can scroll forwards uh 1985 looks a little bit more blurry but then we can start to go forward a little bit more and see how the area changes over time and that's a huge benefit that we have in google earth that we don't really have in many other places especially the fact that we can get such clear imagery one of the other benefits about google earth is the fact that we can bring in different layers as well so for example if i wanted to bring in google maps uh and use their their naming system or or their their data and then also bring in perhaps bing maps in their aerial version i could do that as well and that gives me a entirely different satellite image as to what would usually be available in google earth and that's just through using the kml and kmz's that are freely available on the internet so now we move on to the second satellite imagery source that i really enjoy using a lot which is sentinel hub sentinel hub just like google earth brings in a multiple amount of data sets that you can select from and you can choose to have a look at the sentinel satellite system landsat motor sentinel one but also some others through the eo browser that they have at the moment i'm looking at sentinel hub playground one thing to point out is that the satellite imagery on sentinel hub is not as clear as what you would have on google earth but what sentinel hub lacks in clarity because you can see it's not very clear it makes up for in coverage and let's have a look at what i mean by that so if we have a look on google earth sure things are pretty clear here we can see the streets quite well we can see very much the fine definition in the buildings when we scroll back in time and we use that historical slider you'll notice that it jumps almost months so for you can see that it's almost jumping every two months or every three months when i scroll back over london with google earth imagery in other areas that's much more worse where it'll skip years not just months on sentinel hub on the other hand you can see that i'm currently viewing 2019 but let's jump ahead to july 2021 and you can see just how much coverage there is for july already so almost every three days there's a satellite image for july of course each time there's a shot sometimes there might be clouds and if we keep going back we can find a nice cloud-free shot just like we have on the 31st of may here so you can see that there are a there is a lot more uh satellite imagery available on sentinel hub than there is on google earth but it's just not as clear this is also quite useful as a tool because we can manipulate what we can see to bring out different sorts of things in satellite imagery for example if we wanted to look at banding on the satellite image to have a look at the infrared so the vegetation filter sentinel hub really allows us to do that without doing any manual coding or manual gis work which is a little bit more difficult than the click of a button we can go to false color urban we can go agriculture i always like to use the color infrared because when there's a fire or burnt area it's indicated much more easily or much more visible than just the natural color of the satellite imagery one of the other cool things about sentinel hub is that allows you to easily apply different custom scripts to satellite imagery as well so for example if we wanted to see when the fires were burning in australia and apply a fire filter over that to see just how big those fires actually were when they were burning we can use sentinel hub to really get a good visualization of that if you like to have a look at different images of wildfires or things like that then this is quite useful for you there's also a lot of research as to how fires actually spread their impact where they burn and things like that as well and satellite imagery can be quite useful for that especially when you've got an added filter that shows where the current burning is and a satellite image just like this so that's the power of sentinel hub which is much more useful than the sporadic imagery on google earth just because of the coverage and the fact that there's so many uh different ways to process that imagery as well you can also create a time lapse because there is so many images and i've created another youtube video which i'll link to in the description below on that one but now let's move on to the third source of satellite imagery that i've been using a lot recently which is zoom earth as you can see i'm quite zoomed out at the moment and there's a lot of details that we can see uh so you can see something that might look more like a um like a weather map so we can even see uh nighttime effects we've got a couple of filters on here of where the rain is where certain storms might be showers clouds things like that any dust clouds that might be coming over and we can also even play a time lapse of that as well so here i'm just creating an animation to scroll through on a basis to see the cloud movements and to see what's been happening to this side of west africa as it moves along it's also really nice to zoom in and have a look at the alternative details in zoom earth that we might not be able to see in google earth so for example let's go to a location in afghanistan on google earth even if we try and scroll back in time the imagery of this area is very blurry and that's because afghanistan as a wider area similar to iraq has quite blurry or graded imagery however if we go to the same location on zoom earth which brings in satellite imagery from microsoft we can see that same location in so much more detail than what we can see on google earth which is quite useful if you're doing work in locations where images might be blurry or they might not be as available and this really helps if you're trying to geolocate specific videos so for example uh this video of an airstrike from the ministry of defense in afghanistan and we can see the smoke cloud climate come up through there and we can also see the the the buildings here and those buildings these two buildings match the exact buildings that we have right here whereas on google earth we wouldn't be able to verify that footage zoom earth is also really cool for the fact that it has a really handy function to detect wildfires and sources of heat so if i click that icon on the right over there and i go down to say a location like this where we can see lots of these little red dots these are heat indicators and this actually draws in information from firms so if we have a look at those places we can get a little bit closer and we can actually see what's going on there and so yes there's a heat signature coming out of this oil refinery there and that's why there would be a lot of these uh in this area so now moving on to the fourth source for satellite imagery that i get a lot of use out of which is the world imagery wayback tool and what's really useful about this is that i can go back in time with some of these shots so for example i'm having a look at 2020 now so i'll go back to 2019. and maybe even back to 2016 and we can see that there's different shots for each one obviously being afghanistan there will be less coverage however if we try that for different places we'll get a lot more so one of the cooler things we can do is do a toggle swipe mode which will let me choose between two images so say one with 2020 and one with 2014 and i can slide between these and just see the change in satellite imagery between 2014 and 2020 which is really cool and it's something that we cannot even do on google earth with afghanistan and with a lot of other regions as well just with the availability of the satellite imagery or also this nice little tool just to slide between the dates as well so those are the four favorite tools that i really like to use to get access to satellite imagery for free i hope you enjoyed this session uh please leave a like and a share if you think that this might be helpful for anyone uh that is interested in satellite imagery or geospatial intelligence or environmental research or in a newsroom if you're a journalist please do share it and also don't forget to leave a comment below on any other sources that you use for satellite imagery perhaps what you use satellite imagery for so thank you very much and i'll see you in the next session

Channel: Bendobrown

Views: 1,181,211

Keywords: geoint, satellite imagery, google earth, sentinel hub, zoom earth, geolocation, gis, geospatial

Id: OONjbRAR-TM

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sobakablack]

Bendobrown: This tutorial is part 9 of the OSINT At Home series. It covers a common question that I get asked a lot, which is where I am getting my satellite imagery from. So I’ve made this tutorial on my four favourite satellite imagery sources and tools – and they’re all free.