Blue Marble Terrain

Description
NASA's Blue Marble project presents freely available photorealistic maps of our planet Earth. Since the seventies earth observation satellites have recorded data of our atmosphere, the oceans and the land surface to improve our understanding of the Earth as a system. These datasets are usually not publicly accessible and they are only available as scientific file types. Therefore the Blue Marble project produces high resolution maps in false-color and true-color formats from the scientific satellite data. This allows the user to become a discoverer and to investigate our planet from space. With these products we would like to stimulate the public interest for matters of the environment and also express the importance of unmanned satellite missions carried out by the NASA and other space organizations.

The Blue Marble "Next generation" is the latest product of the series, showing a cloudless Earth in 12 monthly variations: the beginning of spring, dry spells, snow cover changes, vegetation coloring and rainy seasons all are dynamic processes in our climate system. The monthly satellite maps are available under bluemarble.nasa.gov.

The Civilization IV users now can discover their Worlds with a special Blue Marble texture set modelled from this material. Have a lot of fun with it!