I noticed today that there is a discrepancy between the map and satellite views. This can be seen by observing a recognizable structure (e.g., a house) as shown in satellite view and as shown on the map view. I am wondering which view is considered more accurate. The differences are not large - i…

Deal with this a lot in OpenStreetMap, in my experience Maxar imagery is generally pretty inaccurate and that tends to be what Google uses. I generally use ESRI imagery when editing OSM and its significantly more accurate then anything Google has. I typically just use the coordinates off my camera a…

This is a pretty common problem working with base maps in GIS. It’s easy to take for granted that Google (for example) is accurate, but that’s far from the case. I first realised this when I found myself involved in a project located on the join between two “units” of Google imagery where dealing wi…

As bryannamar and lynkos said, aligning maps is a common issue in GIS. There are a number of reasons this happens; one is projecting a flat image taken from a satellite onto the spheroid model of the Earth that underlies the GPS data. Some of the sattelite image may be perfectly aligned, but in area…

complex terrain with a lot of relief can complicate that rectification process, too. also large areas with few really good points spread across the image to use as references for the rectification process. I did my share of Landsat image rectification for my master’s thesis research. one of my mos…

This is a rather curious, but well-known question. The point is that, for historical reasons, Google Maps and Google Earth use different coordinate systems. When you use the satellite view, the Earth is shaped like a WGS 84 ellipsoid (EPSG:4326 - https://epsg.io/4326 ). But. In map view, the Earth be…

In addition to all the reasons others have given, Google Earth uses a mix of satellite images and any given satellite is in a different position. As a result the angle of the image can be very different from image to image, and in complex terrain, near islands, or anywhere there is something tall a…

GIS Mapping Discrepancies

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GIS Mapping Discrepancies

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