Until relatively recently much satellite imagery was either too expensive or of relatively low resolution to be useful for site identification. There were applications but it was little used except where traditional aerial photography was not available (e.g. Turkey: Kennedy 1998).
Google Earth (GE) has been transformational and all in a very short time. It has been possible to view parts of the land surface of Jordan on GE through high resolution ‘windows’ for several years. Quality could be very variable but there was a steady improvement as higher resolution imagery replaced lower. In general imagery was Landsat 15 m per pixel. Early in 2008 this Landsat imagery used by GE for Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine was replaced by French SPOTImage. At a stroke the overall quality was improved dramatically and much of the land surface was readable in quite fine detail – about 2.5 m resolution. In general it is possible to explore almost the entire land surface of Jordan on GE and to use it to define the locations of sites which can then be flown and photographed in the appropriate conditions.
Some areas – few but still significant - are still poor and it is my impression there has been a decline in quality in some places. For the first, it is striking that military bases and airports are all highly visible. For the latter, it is disappointing that much of the rich archaeological area just west of the Azraq Oasis is ‘cloudy’ and almost unusable. To a lesser degree that is also true of part of the area just east of Jerash.
The strengths of GE are visibly evident to anyone using it. More useful here is to illustrate the limitations through a second example from the Panhandle area.
The first image is a screenshot from Google Earth of the Basalt Desert just east of the Azraq Oasis (downloaded 6 April 2009). At optimum resolution one can only just detect the walls of a Kite tails and infer the head at centre of the image.
The aerial photograph of 2 November 2008 (APA_20081102_DLK-112 (Rajil Kite 5)) shows the Kite very clearly and in detail. Two flights in this wider area in 2008 revealed numerous sites which had been undetectable on GE but were clear from the air.
The GE screenshot downloaded on 6 April 2009 shows the area just west of Azraq Duruz (bottom right). In detail one can see several examples of Wheels just beyond the northern edge of the cloudy window. Both from earlier flying and from older Landsat imagery it is known there are numerous Wheel cemeteries scattered across this area.
The second image – an aerial photograph of 2 November 2008 (APA_20081102_DLK-21 (Azraq Wheels Cemetery C)) – shows part of one of those cemeteries, totally obscured by the cloudy imagery of GE. | 
