Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know I like the ability to show satellite views of clouds over the Earth. To me it quickly illustrates how Google Earth can pull in information from places on the Internet, overlay them over the Earth, and produce a visualization which is both informative and beautiful to behold. Earlier this year, Google Earth Community member ‘barnabu’ (who has produced many cool time animations and 3D models for GE – see below) wrote a script to capture each image overlay of global clouds which are produced every three hours. He used this to produce a cloud animation for the past 10 days (about 5 Mbytes each). He now has enough data (for the first five months of the year) that he has compiled month-long cloud animations (about 16 Mbytes each). You could load more than one of these, but they will likely slow down your machine because they are so large. But, it is definitely cool watching an animation of an entire month of weather progression. For example, check out the cloud animation for January 
(16 Mbytes). Once it loads in Google Earth, hit the “play” button (the right-arrow to the right of the time slider) to start the time animation.
A special note of thanks to Hari Nair at Xplanet who wrote the program that produces the composite satellite photos global clouds.
Other cool things by ‘barnabu’:
- Bouncing Earth
- Turning Torso Building
- Jupiter Clouds in Motion
- Animating Building Growth in London
- Google Saturn
- Kings College Chapel in Cambridge
- MI6 Headquarters
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.