The devastation left behind Hurricane Katrina is awful. ‘johnmora’ of Nashville, TN watched a helicopter video from the website of WLBT of Jackson, MS and created placemarks for showing the Google Earth locations for various shots of complete destruction shown in the video (based on timestamp). Here is his post at the Google Earth BBS.
You should go to the WLBT website and select the video titled: “Mississippi Gulf Coast Damage from Skycopter 3“. If you are viewing the video with Windows Media Player look to the lower right for the current time stamp, or when using the slider to go to a particular part of the video. You can load John’s placemarks here 
. Then match the time stamp to the placemarks John created.
If you haven’t seen much of the video of the damage, this is one video you should watch. These placemarks help you see what it was like before these beautiful places were demolished.
Weather
Hurricanes/Tropical Data
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!
All Atlantic Hurricanes 1851-Present
In a post a month ago, Paul Seabury announced he had converted the tracks and information on all Hurricane Tracks since 1851 into GE Files. Here is a link to the web page where you can download the files for each decade’s worth of tracks. Each file contains place marks organized into folders for for each year, and so on.
As an example, he offered the 1960s tracks . Open the GE File and you will see a new Places entry,and 1960 hurricanes storm tracks will appear (as shown above). A legend showing the storm category colors is also shown. Open the places folders to show a particular year and turn it on. You will see all the storms for that particular year.
If you zoom in, each mark on the track is labeled with the date and time of position, clicking on a mark on the track shows even more storm information.
Excellent work Paul!
Clouds of the Earth
One thing missing when you see the earth upon opening GE is the lack of any clouds. This link will open a KML file which downloads the latest view from space of clouds for the entire earth. The satellite photo is usually only minutes old, so the coulds are pretty close to real-time. The image file is about 450K, but those of you who use Google Earth probably have the bandwidth.
I keep this “Global Cloud Map” in My Places for a quick look at what kind of weather is out there.
[EDIT: 9/26/05 – This link stopped working, so I’ve found a new improved Global Cloud map which you can find here]
Hurricane Tracking
(click for larger image)
During mid-July Hurricane Emily crossed the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. I was just learning about Google Earth’s KML file format, so I decided to create a hurricane track . Based on another post in the GE forums by someone called mcshea98, I created a track and updated a few times a day based on data from WeatherUnderground. The numbers along the track represent the hurricane category, and if you click on the numbers you will get data such as wind speed and pressure. I posted the KML file on the GE Forums here.
Both visual satellite and infared satellite photos are downloaded in real-time when you first open the GE file. Since the storm is long gone, what you will see now is the current weather conditions.
As you can see from the screen shot, the hurricane was located where my track was at the time of the screenshot. As your child gets older, the more technology-based their toys are going to get. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be just as educational as the toddler toys they had in preschool, though. There are a lot of choices out there when it comes robot toys for kids. Cooking at home is as popular as ever, especially with the introduction of all sorts of new technologies and tools that make your time in the kitchen better and more effective than ever. Portioning, preparing, or just making sure your meal is immaculately prepared on a day to day basis, now is possible with the best kitchen scales from https://scaleszen.com/best-digital-kitchen-scales/.
Click here to see the file itself from within GE.