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December 29, 2011

Volcano forms a new island in the Red Sea

Earlier this month, a volcano erupted in the Red Sea with fisherman reporting the lava fountains reaching heights of up to 30 meters! The imagery of the eruption, captured by NASA's EO-1 ("Earth Observing-1) satellite, shows an amazing plume of ash and water vapor.

This volcano erupted in an area of previously unbroken water, and apparently caused the formation of a new island, seen here:

You can read more about this on NASA's Earth Observatory site or see it in Google Earth by using this KML file.

Posted by mickmel at 9:08 AM | Comments (1)

December 28, 2011

Did you know that Disney built a town called Celebration?

While Disney is famous for their theme-parks, which we've covered before, did you know that they also built a town? Google Sightseeing takes us on a brief tour of Celebration, the town that Disney built in the mid-1990s.

The city was was designed around its downtown, to encourage walking rather than driving. The town has some very cute buildings it in, such as the post office seen below. However, Disney was careful to keep it generically cute, and not include any Disney-like features such as Mickey Mouse ears or Dumbo-shaped bushes.

Once complete, as planned, Disney sold the town to a property investment corporation. You can learn more about the city on their official website.

As they typically do, Google Sightseeing has created a KML file to showcase all of the locations found in their post. The city has sharp aerial imagery from 2010 and very comprehensive Street View imagery, making it a fun town to explore in Google Earth!

Posted by mickmel at 9:53 AM | Comments (1)

December 27, 2011

Tracking the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race in Google Earth

The Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht race, now in its 66th year, is underway off the coast of Australia. The 628 nautical mile race, in which racers travel from from Sydney Harbor to the historical port city of Hobart, is a very popular event in Australia. Event organizers have provided Google Earth tracking of the race for a few years now, and it's a great way to follow the race.

Along with the course line and locations of each boat, as seen above, you can click on any of the boat icons for more information; details on the boat, a photo, description, precise location, etc. It's quite a comprehensive file. The file is built as a network link, so it automatically updates itself with new information every 10 minutes.

To get the KML file for the race, simply visit this page on their site. Along with instructions, they also have a couple of KML files available to download. One is the main racing KML, the other is a CSIRO file that shows sea surface temperature and current directions, which is a great supplement to the main file. Head over there and follow the race right now!

Posted by mickmel at 8:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2011

North American power plant emissions

A few months ago we told you about Enipedia, a wiki-based source for energy information. It's an amazing site, but Jeff told us about another one that has a few new features that we haven't seen before. The KMZ file from the CEC (Commission for Environmental Cooperation) lets you choose which contaminants you want to visualize; the balloons provide info and emissions profiles for each power plant.

While their tool isn't global (they focus on North America), they look at each of their 3,144 plants with more depth. They provide detailed emissions info for 8 different contaminants, including Mercury, which is a big issue right now because of EPA's new regulations on coal-fired power plants.

Google Earth is an amazing tool to display this kind of information, and the data provided by the CEC is an excellent example of that. Much more information can be found on their site at: www.cec.org/powerplants

Posted by mickmel at 9:22 AM | Comments (1)

December 23, 2011

Tracking Santa's journey in Google Earth

Starting around 2am EST tonight, Santa's journey will begin and NORAD will once again be tracking his every move!

His journey will be tracked using a variety of methods including satellites, radar and fighter jets.

You can view the main Santa tracker here. Unfortunately, it only runs in the Google Earth plugin in your browser (not in the desktop version of Google Earth), and you can't make it full screen so you are stuck with a smaller image. It would also be nice if you could view it on your tablet version of Google Earth. But, read on for other ways to follow his journey throughout the day.

Here's a "behind the scenes" video from Google's Bruno Bowden on the origins of the NORAD Santa Tracker:

There are a lot of great ways to follow him on his journey, thanks to the folks at NORAD and some help from Google:

• Watch his progress on Google Maps. Visit noradsanta.org to see a map of his location and his next scheduled stop.

• Watch him fly by using the Google Earth Plug-in. Visit the "Track in Google Earth" page to watch Santa fly by using the Google Earth Plug-in. The past few years I fired up this page on my netbook, placed it up on the mantle, and we kept a close eye on Santa all day long.

• New this year; follow Santa with OnStar. If you have a GM car with OnStar, you'll be able to push the OnStar button and get an update on Santa's location (more info).

• Follow his progress on your phone. Search for [santa] in Google Maps for Mobile, or visit m.noradsanta.org from your phone to track his progress while you're on the go.

• Follow him on other services, such as his YouTube channel, Twitter account and Facebook Page.

Having NORAD track Santa has been a tradition for decades, and using Google Earth/Maps to track him has quickly become a popular tradition of its own. Millions of people track Santa using these fun new methods, with more joining in every year. Have fun!

Posted by mickmel at 7:28 AM | Comments (4)

December 22, 2011

Giant Santas in Google Street View

With Christmas just a few days away, there are a variety of Christmas-themed maps and games popping up. A few days ago, Google Sightseeing showcased a variety of giant Santas that can be found in Google StreetView. You can grab this KML file to view them in Google Earth

There's also a site that creates a custom animated Christmas message, showing snow on top of a Street View image of your house, or you can take it further and have a short movie created with your Street View imagery, along with photos that you upload. (both via Google Maps Mania)

Check back tomorrow for details on how to track Santa's progress on Christmas Eve!

Posted by mickmel at 7:50 AM | Comments (1)

December 21, 2011

Using Google Earth in the classroom

Since the earliest days of Google Earth, many have viewed it as an amazing tool to use in the classroom - and they're right! We first showed some educational uses for Google Earth more than five years ago, and since then we've seen great uses from Duke University and StrataLogica, among others.

Today we're looking at GEteach, a site developed by 9th-grade Geography teacher Josh Williams. The site uses the Google Earth Plug-in to give you quick access to a wide variety of information such as the CIA Factbook, population densities, and various other human and physical geographic overlays.

The site also includes a "Two Earth" mode to allow you to view different layers side-by-side, similar to AnotherEarth. This is a great way to show students how natural aspects of the earth can affect human behavior, such as comparing the "vegetation" index to the "population density", as seen here:

I asked Josh for more info about how the site got started, and he came through with the full story of the site, shared below:

My major is Geography and like most people I've always been intrigued with Google Earth. For the past 6 years I've been trying to find ways to incorporate Google Earth in my 9th grade geography classroom. At first I scoured the internet for kml files that worked with my curriculum, but very little seemed to fit. Three years ago I started creating Earth's with simple placemarks of images and maybe some text within the balloons. I later found an interesting script allowing me to export ESRI shapefiles into kml. This was the turning point that led to what you see today. My first useful Google Earth file was an Earth where I incorporated CIA Factbook data into balloons. I later created dozens of thematic Earths using the same process. My students currently use improved versions of these thematic maps to observe, understand, and predict levels of development for regions and countries.

Two years ago I stumbled across NASA's Earth Observatory website and discovered how they wrapped their images around an Earth. I then used that process and NASA's content to show mostly physical geographic patterns and processes. The images from NASA like blue marble, average land temperature, plant growth, sea temperatures, and topography are great at showing the students Earth/Sun relationships, climate controls, and physical processes impacted on population distributions (NASA Earth Observatory has a nice population density map).

Over the past year and a half I have been trying to put all of these Earths together in a package teachers and students could use. I quickly realized that creating a website using Google Earth api would be the most efficient way to control and distribute the content. Over that past year I have learned a little html, JavaScript, css, and jquery. I started first with embedding a webpage with Google Earth gadget files. As I learned more about html and JavaScript I ditched the gadget and created simple webpages with using the api. Nystrom then came by our school to demo Stratalogica (a great Google Earth tool for education). I thought I was going to be able to stop developing my webpage, but realized that I could not get my content on their page. After seeing Stratalogica, I spoke with my father and told him I thought we could create a really cool website available to everyone. We spent a year building geteach. The Google Earth side was pretty easy. We just went to the Google Earth api site and combined several of their demos like "Hello Earth," "China Syndrome," "Fetch kml," ect... Creating and incorporating menus, iframe shims, creating and replacing iframes to change with the selected Earth (they hold the Earth's descriptions, map legends/keys, and credits), and creating a really cool array were more challenging and took a while to learn; especially because my father and I had to learn or relearn most of this. Today's geteach.com is really the 4th version. The first version had a very 2004 look and feel to it. It had ugly generic drop down menus, check boxes, and radio buttons. Version one only had about 6 Earths, but the core functions like choosing different Earths, fetching an Earth, and controlling the left or right earth were all present and working. Version two replaced all the generic forms and buttons with jquery ui buttons. We added an array which allowed more Earths. Version four changed from a table based to a div based html document that allowed the width to adjust with differing resolutions. However, the most time consuming aspect in creating geteach.com is attempting to make it look similar across browsers.

This is the first school year where my students and I have extensively used the website. The first lesson we used geteach.com for was Earth/Sun relations. This is mostly me using Google Earth's grid layer and sun feature to show the solstice and equinox. I then click to the multi-earth and demonstrate how temperature and vegetation is impacted by this relationship. The students' next big lesson is identifying climate regions and the climate controls. Here the students use the climate regions Earth on the left side and change the right Earth to help develop an understanding of what climate controls like elevations, wind currents, ocean currents, latitude, position on the continent, etc. are responsible for the temperature and precipitation patterns. Next the students use level of development indicators like life expectancy, GDP per capita, infant mortality rate, etc. to predict standard of living for regions and countries. Our district curriculum blends regional with conceptual geography. Therefore, with every unit/region (every 3 to 4 weeks) either my students, time permitting, or I will use geteach.com to observe physical and human patterns of the new region and start making spatial observations and peaking curiosity for the unit. It is really a lot of fun and truly why I created this site in the first place. My goal is for students to expend some of their bandwidth on spatial observations, understandings, and predicting. When they ask, "Mr. Williams...why is..?" I know I have them where I want them.

It's a phenomenal way to use Google Earth in a classroom setting, and he has done an awesome job with this site. Great work, Josh!

Posted by mickmel at 8:15 AM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2011

Visualizing Google Analytics data in Google Earth

Introduced six years ago, Google Analytics has quickly become one of the most popular stat-tracking packages around. Many websites, including Google Earth Blog, use it to see which pages on their site are the most popular, how visitors find them, where they come from, etc. It's quite powerful.

When you have software that can show a list of where the visitors to your site are located, it only makes sense to want to view that data in Google Earth. That's where ShufflePoint comes in. Along with a variety of dashboards and charts, ShufflePoint allows you to view your data in Google Maps or Google Earth, as seen here:

To try it for yourself, they have a sample KML file for you to try out, as well as the video below to show more about how it works:

If you use Google Analytics and need a way to better visualize your data, ShufflePoint is certainly something to consider. Prices start at $49/month, presumably for a single site. You can learn more about ShufflePoint on the Google Geo Developers Blog.

Posted by mickmel at 9:01 AM | Comments (1)

December 19, 2011

Help keep Google Earth accurate with the improved Map Maker tool

A little over three years ago, Google introduced "Map Maker" to allow people to make updates to Google Maps and Google Earth. You could mark businesses as being closed, move their pins around, edit information, add roads, etc. It's quite a useful tool.

Now Google has updated Map Maker to make it even more powerful and easy to use.

Not only will your updates appear on Google Maps and Google Earth (after they're approved by a Google staff member), but they'll also appear on Google Maps Mobile -- and that's very important. With the growing popularity of Google Navigation on Android, accurate maps are a necessity. This also shows why Google Navigation is so wildly popular; rather than getting yearly updates (for $99) like a Garmin device, you get access to maps that are updated daily for free!

Here's a quick video showing everything you can do with it:

I've made quite a few small contributions on Google Map Maker, and you're encouraged to do the same. Hopefully the new changes to Map Maker will help make your task even easier.

Have you added anything to Map Maker in the past? Do you plan to now?

(via Google Lat Long Blog)

Posted by mickmel at 9:03 AM | Comments (4)

December 16, 2011

Google Earth on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Back in May, Google Earth for Android was updated with 3D building support on tablets. Despite the additional load of the 3D buildings, the software continued to run remarkably smoothly and continues to be an amazing way to view Google Earth.

At the time, the 3D buildings didn't show up on phones; it wasn't even an option. However, on the Galaxy Nexus the 3D buildings are in there and they look great!

There was no update to Google Earth recently, and the buildings still aren't available on my old phone (a Motorola Droid X), so presumably Google Earth looks at the hardware on your phone before presenting you with that option. If so, that seems like a wise move. Here is what the options panel looks like on the Galaxy Nexus:

I don't know what the minimal specs are offhand, but a dual-core processor seems like a good place to start. The Google Earth page in the Android market simply says "select phones", so I don't have a full list of compatible phones yet. As another added bonus, Google Earth came preinstalled on the phone; I'm quite sure that was not the case on the Droid X.

With the large, stunningly high screen resolution on the Galaxy Nexus (1280x720), Google Earth looks simply brilliant. More phones of this quality and beyond will be coming in 2012, which will make the mobile Google Earth experience even better.

Leave a comment and let us know if your phone supports 3D buildings in Google Earth and we'll begin compiling a list. Thanks!

Posted by mickmel at 7:49 AM | Comments (15)

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