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Google Earth weather information out of date

June 18, 2015

As a number of GEB readers have noted, some of Google Earth’s weather layers have not been working correctly and as of this writing the data is out of date. The ‘Conditions and Forecasts’ layer has not been updated since May 28th, 2015. The ‘Oceans Observations’ layer has even older data, mostly from 2013. The ‘Clouds’ and ‘Radar’ layers are up to date – see the ‘Information’ layer for exact date and time for each and for animated versions of both layers.

We believe Google is aware of the problem with the ‘Conditions and Forecasts’ layer and is working to resolve it. Because weather information is really only useful when it is current, Google should consider modifying the layer to either give a clear warning message when weather information is out of date, or to replace the old data altogether with a ‘data unavailable’ message.

It is, of course, possible to get weather information from many other sources including weather.com the source Google Earth uses. We have not been able to find any site that gives similar weather information in KML format, but there are a number of different weather resources that are available in that format. A while back Frank made a collection of weather resources and it was updated by Mickey. We have also found that NOAA and NASA provide a variety of weather datasets as KMLs, although they are mostly focused on North America.

Sea surface temperatures
Sea surface temperatures from NASA.

About Timothy Whitehead

Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Filed Under: Site News, Weather Tagged With: weather

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PLEASE NOTE: Google Earth Blog is no longer writing regular posts. As a result, we are not accepting new comments or questions about Google Earth. If you have a question, use the official Google Earth and Maps Forums or the Google Earth Community Forums.

Comments

  1. Chris says

    June 18, 2015 at 12:41 pm

    The conditions and forecasts layer has now vanished. Perhaps Google read GEB.

    • Chris says

      June 18, 2015 at 4:38 pm

      Has now returned, but still with glitches – the day after tomorrow (Friday) is “Tuesday” and the link to the ten day forecast fails, for example, and the sun icons still shine after sunset.

  2. Paul says

    June 19, 2015 at 4:07 am

    There is a new Layer called “Coming soon!” with a Star icon. seems like there really is some work being done at Google, whatever it may be.



PLEASE NOTE: Google Earth Blog is no longer writing regular posts. As a result, we are not accepting new comments or questions about Google Earth. If you have a question, use the official Google Earth and Maps Forums or the Google Earth Community Forums.

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