An image that some say helped to mobilize the environmental movement during the 1970s is that of Earth rising above the moon, photographed by an Apollo 8 astronaut in 1968. To many, the photo of a blue planet, contrasted against the frigid blackness of space, illustrated the fragility and importance of planet Earth.

Forty years later, Earth imagery in support of environmental science has reached a new level with Microsoft Virtual Earth, a globe mapping and geospatial visualization tool. With its superb imagery, integration with widely used Microsoft tools, and enterprise-level capability, Virtual Earth is creating yet another transformation in how we view the planet.

A Clear View of Earth with Geospatial Data

Today Virtual Earth is used by environmental researchers, government agencies, academics, and others to bring the planet into clear focus. Virtual Earth's growing impact can, in part, be traced to the notion that maps and Earth images are a natural and effective way to organize information. "A lot of the information we deal with in our daily lives is geospatially related," says Bill Gail, director of strategic development for Virtual Earth.

"We're just beginning to make widespread use of these geospatial relationships. Engineers have worked with geospatial information for many years. With Virtual Earth, we're expanding access to such information beyond this small group of experts so that everyone in the world can benefit from using it directly."

Living Maps, Realistic Imagery

One of Virtual Earth's greatest strengths is its exceptional imagery, covering virtually the entire globe. In many areas, it is possible to zoom to extremely high resolution and view aerial photos taken with digital cameras showing detail as small as 15 centimeters, or satellite-based photos with resolution as good as half a meter.

Virtual Earth also offers a variety of image viewing perspectives, such as a "bird's eye view"—unique to Virtual Earth—which captures realistic 45-degree views of the Earth's surface from four angles, providing details of buildings and natural objects that a top-down view can miss.

Sophisticated computer processing also makes it possible for Virtual Earth to represent terrain features and buildings in 3-D—providing the first highly accurate, truly 3-D replica of Earth accessible through an Internet browser.

"People live and work in three dimensions," says Gail. "You saw video games go from 2-D to 3-D, and you'll see the same transition with how we use the Web to visualize the world around us."

A Flexible Enterprise-Quality Platform

Virtual Earth also offers a flexible way to make geospatial information available to colleagues or the public. Virtual Earth is Web-based: users don't have to download a large application to work with new data or view existing data.

Because Virtual Earth is designed for enterprise-wide use, it offers the kind of robust capability and reliability that government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and businesses want. And Virtual Earth integrates easily with other widely used Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. Virtual Earth provides users with:

• High-resolution aerial and satellite-based imagery.
• Bird's-eye, oblique imagery with realistic 45-degree views of the Earth's surface from four angles.
• Photo-realistic, geo-specific and highly accurate 3-D images of cities and digital elevation models (DEMs).
• A simplified way to share collections of personally annotated locations.
• A 2-D or 3-D browser interface.

"Virtual Earth isn't a one-trick pony," says Jim Keenan, director of sales and marketing for IDV Solutions, a Microsoft partner that used Virtual Earth to map fire damage around San Diego, California to aid recovery efforts after devastating blazes in 2007. "It's a great platform into which we can bring content from SQL or SharePoint."

An Integrated View of Multiple Data Sources

In support of his doctoral dissertation, Microsoft researcher Bora Boren used an early version of Virtual Earth as the basis for a tool called Hydroseek. Hydroseek allows scientists to query 25 different databases, from sources such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the National Atmospheric Deposition Program which monitors precipitation nationwide. Hydroseek also displays the results on Virtual Earth maps, showing regions, watersheds, or particular rivers.

Boren, who works at a Microsoft Research center in San Francisco, now uses the current version of Virtual Earth to create an even more powerful tool he calls a "sci-scope" that will combine data from a wider range of data sources—including an area's geology, hydrology, and ecology.

"The goal of my research is to have a user be able to point to a lake on the map and pull the relevant information about that geographic feature out of the database," says Boran. "Or, to be able to click on a map to select a stream, request a list of dams or stream gauges upstream or downstream of the point where they clicked, and then review data from those gauges."

Creating Opportunities for Deep Analysis

Another Microsoft Researcher, Catharine van Ingen, uses Virtual Earth to help the Berkeley Water Center, a research institute affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley, create detailed data maps of watersheds, such as that of the Russian River in Northern California.

Aggregating data in a visual way with Virtual Earth is a huge improvement over previous methods used by researchers who work in watersheds. "It used to be you had to go to all the different agencies and root around in their data sources and hope you were in the right site," she says.

Van Ingen says that working with environmental data is often different from working with other types of science-related information, and Virtual Earth is an excellent tool for visualizing environmental information and setting the stage for deep analysis.

"The first step in an environmental project is assembly," she says. "You might have to gather precipitation data from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), discharge figures from the USGS, and maybe water temperature from EPA or a local agency. Once you collect that data and display it in Virtual Earth, things really start to pop out at you."

Structure, Support, and Flexibility for Customized Solutions

Virtual Earth's ability to create powerful applications goes well beyond the simple creation of user-defined layers. The easy-to-use Software Development Kit makes it possible for anyone with simple Web site-building skills to create Web-based mapping applications of their own. Virtual Earth platform offers:

• A Web-service model for broad and rapid distribution of business intelligence solutions.
• Support for KML (Keyhole Markup Language) and OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) open standards.
• Easy integration with other Microsoft products, such as SQL Server 2008 (recently released with geospatial extensions) and SharePoint Server (which allows users to contribute data to mapping applications through portals).
• A history of valuable and dependable Microsoft support for enterprise solutions.

Government and business customers understand the importance of the enterprise features built into Virtual Earth. Recently, the EPA rebuilt its database of environmental information (including data such as hazardous waste site locations) and based it on the Virtual Earth platform. Its developers took advantage of the software development kit offered by Microsoft to build the new application, called Envirofacts, in weeks.

"You can look at the source code (for a particular task) and then copy and paste it," says Jerry Skaw, marketing manager for Virtual Earth. "We've seen full-blown applications that have taken just days to create."

"The Virtual Earth API (application programming interface) made it easy to swap out our old, clunky mapping technology and install the new Web-based applications. We were able to integrate the Virtual Earth technology into the online Envirofacts site within three weeks. For the federal government, that's lightning speed," says Pat Garvey, manager of the project for the EPA.

With Virtual Earth, our planet is visible in an entirely new way. "It's one thing to tell someone the Amazon rain forest is being cut down," says Bill Gail. "When you can really see it, the impact is far more powerful."