My friend Valery Hronusov from Russia’s Academy of Science in Perm, Russia (aka Valery35 at the Google Earth Community) continues his prolific output of cool Google Earth files. He has been converting a variety of data sources about our environment from NASA into cool Google Earth visualizations. Today Valery will share with you this collection of overlays showing the progression of day time land temperatures for the Earth for entire years starting with year 2000 until 2005. The data comes from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite project. These are not satellite/aerial photos, but are images of temperature data overlayed on top of GE’s satellite photos.
(NOTE: this is another example of data which would be great if GE had a feature for allowing you to animate placemarks based on time – a feature Google has been considering implementing. Michael Jones, take note!)
Once you download the Day Land Temperatures file, you will see some sub-folders for each year. You should open these sub-folders and turn on each month to look at the data. On my system, if I just turn on an entire year, it kind of animates the overlays while loading them the first time. But, a better way to see the progression of the data is to use the movies Valery has created: small movie (1.2 Mbytes) or larger movie (3.7 Mbytes).
Great work Valery! I’ll be sharing some other similar stuff Valery has done later this week.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
