We have recently updated our aerial imagery in the Digimap for Schools service.  This has been quite a major event in our calendar with a huge amount of data being updated.  The update consisted of approximately 80,000 individual 1km tiles, all of which were captured in 2015, which is approximately 30% of the country.

Prior to this update just over 50% of the data was from 2013 or later, this now has increased to 77% of the data now being from 2013 or later.

This means that more up to date imagery is now available in Digimap for Schools for a significant part of the country.  The map below shows the approximate distribution of the updated data.  http://digimap.blogs.edina.ac.uk/files/2017/03/2015_aerial_update.png

Click on the map to view a larger version

This is the first update we have received from Getmapping, and we are expecting another update later this year containing data captured in 2016.  This data will obviously be introduced as quickly as possible into the service, ensuring that the most up to date data is always available to Digimap for Schools users.

We’ve included a couple of nice images we happened to stumble upon whilst playing around with the new aerial imagery.  The first is an image of a Cruise liner in the Firth of Forth.  This is particularly nice as it illustrates the quality of the imagery where you can literally measure the basketball court.  

Cruise Liner on the Firth of Forth

We also found another fantastic example, one which surprised the entire Digimap for Schools team as it has been built with such precision it looks somewhat other worldy…

Canworthy Solar Farm: Canworthy Solar Farm, which became operational in 2014 and covers approximately 55 hectares (~67 football fields)

NOTE: If you want to find it yourself, search for Canworthy in Digimap for Schools,  then use buffer tool to measure 1 mile from the T-junction at Canworthy Water, slide to Aerial or AerialX and you’ll see it to the NE of Canworthy Water just beyond the buffer circle.

Please feel free to have a good dig around as there are undoubtedly plenty of other hidden gems out there.  Do let us know if you do find anything of interest, we like to let our users know about these little gems.