Bing Maps Updated With 13 Million Square Kilometers Of Updated Imagery

Microsoft has announced that Bing Maps has received a major update, with in excess of 13 million square kilometers of satellite imagery being updated. With the updates, the base satellite imagery is now comprised of 15 meters per pixel, giving a high-resolution look at the world from the comfort of your laptop or mobile device.

With the updated resolution, users can now zoom in to Top of the World imagery to a 13x level, at which point further zooming will pull up high-resolution satellite images. More detail is also visible in certain locations now thanks to cloud reduction, which removes clouds from locations where they are often present, revealing the details below them.

The base satellite imagery was provided by TerraColor, while bathymetric imagery has also been added, which is basically underwater topography. Because of this, oceans no longer look like endless blue swatches of water, but instead have coloring to indicate depths and mounds of the ocean floor. This provides quite a bit more detail than was previously available, which you can see represented in the image above.

Finally, there has been a release of additional Global Ortho imagergy to the tune of a tad over 203,000 square kilometers. This amounts to a total of 11,001,500 square kilometers, of which there is 100-percent coverage of the United States and 90-percent of Western Europe. Global Ortho imagery is high-resolution orthophotos that were taken "straight down" from an airplane.

[via Bing]