Last year i introduced the Musaicum EU-plus, a new 10m resolution satellite image mosaic of Europe, which pioneered a new, more automated classical mosaic production technique. I am happy to now introduce a new regional mosaic of West Asia with similar specifications.

The new mosaic covers the region that is commonly called West Asia ranging from the Suez Canal to the eastern border of Iran. In the north the image not only includes the whole Caucasus region but also parts of Ukraine, Russia and Kazachstan up to about 50 degrees latitude – Essentially the southern parts of far eastern Europe that are not included in the Musaicum EU-plus.

Quite a bit of work went into further refining the production technique to achieve good results in the diverse geographic settings that can be found in West Asia. In the Caucasus region you can largely find climate and vegetation conditions similar to mountains in Europe. Across much of the region, however, you find predominantly winter rain and a vegetation maximum in early spring, somewhat similar to southern Europe, but much more variable from year to year. Hence i used a significantly broader data basis here than for Europe ranging from 2019 to 2024 to be able to approximately depict the multi-year vegetation maximum. Compared to the Green Marble, which shows a multi-year average of the season of maximum vegetation this more strongly emphasizes the presence of vegetation. In a region like this where dried sparse vegetation is not well discernible from bare ground and where many parts will only see significant greening every few years this is highly beneficial to well work out the differences in ground cover and vegetation.

Towards Central Asia this seasonal characteristic is further constrained by winter frost which leads to a very short growth period in spring. In addition, in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, we have an influence from the Indian Ocean Monsoon leading to summer rain and a late summer/autumn vegetation maximum.

Most other satellite image mosaic productions ignore all of that and do not regard West Asia as a particularly challenging region. Cloud incidence is generally low so there is plenty of data available, overall, that can be used to assemble a cloud free coverage without much effort. The result is a dry season image which displays most of the region in fairly uniform and structureless brown-gray colors. This, however, creates a wrong impression of a region where there are significant nuances in natural vegetation even in many drier parts.

So the Musaicum West Asia is not only the highest quality image of the region in that resolution class, it is also, to my knowledge, the only one that consistently shows a vegetation maximum rendering and not predominantly a dry season depiction.

You can find the product description and more sample images on the Musaicum West Asia product page.