Hurricane Katrina has just passed through Florida and is gaining strength in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a good time to talk about another weather resource for following Tropical storms in the Atlantic.
In a timely post back in late July, Paul Seabury (the same guy who posted the excellent resource showing All Hurricanes Since 1851 I wrote about earlier) has compiled a network link that automatically presents the current forecasts models, sea surface temperatures, satellite pictures, and other data for all current Atlantic tropical storms. You can download it here 
.
This is such a convenient tool, I’ve made it a permanent part of my Places folder. Make sure you explore the various sub-folders which contain things like SST (Sea Surface Temperatures in various formats), and Satellite Images. Excellent work again Paul!
Network Links
City of Portland GIS
The City of Portland, Oregon’s GIS (Graphical Information System) team just announced public availability of their KML (GE compatible) files allowing access to several layers of GIS data for their city. This includes things such as crime statistics, zoning, earthquake data, flood plains, and a lot of other useful data.
The neat thing is that these are network layers and are based on your current view of the city. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but you zoom to the area of Portland you are interested in, and a couple of seconds later an image loads showing that layer’s data. You need to turn off a layer (click on it’s checkmark box in the Places box), before loading another one or things become confusing.
So, you can go to their web site at: www.portlandmaps.com/google.cfm.
If you’re just curious, I suggest scrolling down on this page and viewing their screenshots, and clicking on the corresponding KML file for the layer that interests you. Or you can click here to see the Zoning layer shown here.
This is yet another example of serious business applications using Google Earth as the visualization tool.
Geosnapper.com Photos
Just found another photo finding network link which, based on your view, will show the nearest photos in the Geosnapper.com database. This link was posted by technomagination at the GE Community site here.
This network link works just like the Geotagged Flickr network link I wrote about earlier.
Geotagged Flickr photos on the fly…
[EDIT – 10-Jan-2006: this network link is currently not working. The author who supported it recently went to work for Flickr and is migrating it to new servers at Yahoo (who own Flickr).]
This is truly an amazing feature of Google Earth. It’s all about the network link – a feature Google Earth has to allow a place you are viewing to tap into applications or data running on someone elses server on the Internet.
Imagine being able to find the photos anyone has taken near the place you are looking at in Google Earth. Imagine little icons of the photos appear magically at the coordinates where the photos were taken from within Google Earth. Now, follow this link to watch it happen right now! (NOTE: Turn this Place link on, then place yourself at a place of interest and wait 30 seconds or so. Little photo icons should start appearing if there are photos at Flickr near those coordinates. If not, try moving to a more popular location or zooming out a bit.)
You can click on the little photo icons and a pop-up cloud appears with a link “View at Flickr” which will let you see the full-sized photo.
The Network Link is the most power feature within Google Earth. There are already lots of interesting features being implemented using the network link and I predict there will be even cooler features coming out soon.
I found the Flickr 50 network link through this post at the Google Earth Community.