With another Category 5 storm to watch (Hurricane Wilma) this is a good time to remind people that Google Earth can be a powerful tool for tracking storms. Here is a collection of automated storm tracking tools 
for instant use within Google Earth. These tools allow you to see the track and forecasts for all current tropical storms around the world. They also give you access to nearby towns, webcams at those towns, satellite photos (water vapor, infared, visible), spectral scans, sea surface temperatures, global cloud maps, and more. Also included is a variety of published data including winds, barometric pressure, and much more.
[Edit 20-Oct-2005: added Global NASA dynamic data including SST, Rainfall, and wind magnitudes. From pdchawaii].
Science
Meteor Craters on Earth
Over the last few millions of years the Earth has had quite a few impacts from meteors, asteroids, and maybe even peices of comets. Scientists have confirmed 172 locations on the Earth determined to be “impact structures”. In fact, the leading theory for the mass extinction of many animals, including the dinosaurs, 65.5 million years ago was an impact crater known as the “Chicxulub crater”. These locations have been documented in a database available at the Earth Impact Database.
Thinklemon.com has taken the Impact Database and created Google Earth network links (he gets extra points for this) which not only shows the location of the 172 impacts, but shows a size indicator for the larger ones and provides links to Wikipedia articles and other information in the descriptions. He has organized the list by major continents and also includes a list of the top 25. Here is his announcement with his links, or you can download the entire collection now. This is a very nice collection, and since I have a degree in astronomy myself, I just had to write about this. Great job Caspar!
By the way, a good friend of mine has spent over 20 years as an astronomer helping to find near-Earth objects which may someday strike the Earth. He works at the Spacewatch Project at the University of Arizona. If anyone with lots of funding is looking to help us make plans to avoid a major future impact, Spacewatch would be a good project to fund.
The Ants Go Marching One by One
The Google Blog released a story today by Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences about his web site Antweb. This web site would normally be of interest mostly to Entomologists, providing specifications and specimen photographs of those sometimes pesky little critters known to most as “ants”.
What is interesting is that Antweb has created a network link to access their georeferenced data for where specimens were collected in Google Earth. And, actually its kind of interesting to browse the numerous links around the world and click on a placemark to see if there is a picture. You then follow the link provided to the Antweb web page and you may see high-magnification specimen photos. Some of these ants look like they belong in an alien scifi horror movie.
This is definitely worth a download, but be forewarned. They have a huge number of placemarks and they download all of them for the entire world at once. It may cause your application to get slow for a minute while downloading and viewing placemarks. I would suggest they use a view-based query link to show just the placemarks for a smaller area of the world you are viewing. Still, this is an amazingly good application for use with Google Earth. Way to go bug guy!
Oh, and the bug guy was so glad to get help from Google with his project that he named an Ant after them: Proceratium google.
Asteroid Occultations
Since I have a degree in astronomy, I had to write about this one. A couple of weeks ago Google Maps Mania published an article about a Google Maps mashup (custom application) which allows you to see the tracks of Asteroid Occultation viewing paths. Not only did the author of the site allow you to view the paths in Google Maps, but he also creates Google Earth KML files so you can view them in GE.