While Tropical Storm Karen is continuing to weaken as it approaches land, it is never wise to ignore a storm of this size if you’re in the path. If you’d like to keep an eye on Karen using Google Earht, you have a few options.
While much of NOAA is shut down due to the U.S. Governmental shutdown, they’re keeping Karen-related information up and running. In fact, the KML that they provide (which you can download here) is an excellent tool for learning about Karen in Google Earth.
There are also some useful tools built directly into Google Earth. Under the “Layers” on the left side of your screen is an option for [Weather], which contains layers for clouds and radar imagery, among others.
You can also turn on the main [Places] layer on the left, which will reveal an icon in the Gulf of Mexico that can be clicked on to show more information about Tropical Storm Karen. Enabling a few of these layers will result in something like this:
If you come across any other useful tools for tracking this storm, please leave a comment below and let us know about them.