There is no data.Ī lot can still be inferred even when the exact data for Boquete is missing by looking at the weather patterns east or west of the missing areas, but obviously this is less exact. So it is not clear on the afternoon of April 3. It is missing for the Boquete area and area north of the Mirador for Apr 1 AM, Apr 3 PM, Apr 10 AM, and Apr 10 PM. If you zoom out, you can see these elongated zones of missing data.

This is because the Earth rotates faster near the equator. The swaths are large enough to overlap for most of the Earth except close to the equator. It's important to note that the satellites making this data are in sun synchronized polar orbits and that the Earth rotates under them. It's probably easy for a lot of us to look at the first daytime photos and assume that the sun was splitting the stones every day, and that the girls could see for miles in every direction, but it's possible that they couldn't even see 2 feet in front of them a lot of the time.īut it is worth scrolling through the AM and PM on Zoom Earth, to get an idea for yourself what it was like during this time. I don't know how bad the clouds were on the ground, but it does raise the possibility that it was a mist/fog that caused the girls to initially get lost, or at least contributed to them not being able to see for any appreciable distance to find landmarks. Which matches with what we see in the photos.Īnd there aren't clear skies again until April 3rd in the afternoon.Īnd after this it's clouds pretty much all the time, in particular on April 8th in the AM (the night photos) the clouds are the heaviest yet, by far. You can see, for example, that on the morning of the 1st, before midday (when the girls started out on the trail), that there wasn't a cloud in the sky. It's probably only useful for seeing what the cloud cover was like in the jungle area when the girls were there, but for that it does the job quite well. So this satellite resource, Zoom Earth doesn't have very clear imagery, but there are multiple images per day.

Zoom earth app