Huh. I’ve been to both the Bahamas, and lake Michigan. I grew up in Florida on the west coast, in bradenton.
Yes, those colors are real.
Gmaps uses false color at sea, because nobody takes high res satellite images of a big watery nothing. They get better res over land, near coasts, and over large cities.
The clouds forming over Florida do so because of the temperature and elevation differences. Notice the hole in the clouds over lake okochobee.
The moisture rich air blows in from the water, gets warmed up over the land, and rises to an altitude where the pressure and temperature are sufficiently low to allow condensation.
There is one algorithm for processing “land” data, and one for processing “ocean” data, with the results combined into one image. There is a “land/sea” mask that is pretty coarse for picking which algorithm to apply which results in some very shallow water getting processed with the land algorithm. The sharp demarcation shows where the algorithm shifts from one to the other.
Two reasons probably. First you want actual photos of all those little islands so lots of water gets photographed in the processs. Second, the water around those island actually looks nice when photographed so thats the image they use.