Weather

Stunning imagery of Tropical Cyclone Yasi

February 3, 2011

As you probably heard, Tropical Cyclone Yasi recently made landfall just south of Cairns, Australia. Residents have had plenty of time to make plans, so hopefully most were able to get out of the path of the storm.
Yesterday, NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an amazing image of the storm, which you can see here:

To view that image in Google Earth, simply download this KML file

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

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Another great source of information about the storm was the aus-maps severe weather page. They had a lot of info on the page, and also included special maps such as this one, from which you could pull down the KMZ file

and view it yourself in Google Earth.

There has also been some very useful threads over in the Google Earth Community, with users sharing information and files as quickly as they became available.
Finally, don’t forget about the Weather Layer that’s built into Google Earth. The forecasts aren’t particularly helpful for a storm like this, but quick access to the satellite imagery for the area is certainly a great feature to have.

Predict how much solar power your house could generate

January 20, 2011

The fact that the rise of alternative energy and the rise of Google Earth are happening at the same time has led to some amazing Google Earth visualizations of potential alternative energy use, particular with solar power. We’ve seen a 3D rendering of the solar panels at the Googleplex and the US Solar Jobs Map, which shows the potential for hundreds of thousands of new solar-related jobs in the next few years.
We also showed you the Berlin Solar Atlas Project, which allows you to view the “solar potential” for over 14,000 roofs in the city. Today’s story is very similar, but on a much wider (though less detailed) scale.
Coming from the University of California – San Diego is the “California Solar Irradiance Map“, which shows the entire state of California and the amount of energy a horizontally oriented solar panel could expect to receive over the course of a year.

Beyond the overview map that you see above, you can zoom down and get specific data for thousands of individual points on the map, the most important of which is likely the “monthly mean irradiation” that shows how much energy could be generated at different times of the year.

To try it for yourself, download their KMZ file

. To see the individual placemarks, be sure to turn on the “Placemark Data” folder inside of the KMZ.
(via Clean Technica)

Simulate forest fires with ForeFire

December 23, 2010

In a lab at the University of Corsica, the French national research agency CNRS has developed a very slick forest fire simulator that uses the Google Earth Plug-in.

The tool itself is quite impressive, using a physical combustion and spread model to simulate the advance of a fire front. Just choose an ignition point, change the wind to the direction of your choosing, and watch it burn. Even better, you can adjust the wind during the course of a burn to see how things change.
Try it for yourself here: https://forefire.univ-corse.fr/websim/

At the end of the simulation, you can download the final result as a KMZ file for use in Google Earth. That file is pretty cool and gives you a great way to visualize the data.

The simulation takes a lot of data into account, including fuels, roads and elevation. As a result, some point may not start a fire if they are on unburnable land. Also of note is that only Corsica is current set-up in the system, so the rest of the world is currently fireproof.
They’re looking for feedback about the interface and features, so feel free to leave a comment with any ideas you might have.

View the 2010 Hurricane Season in Google Earth

December 10, 2010

Greg at Geodesic contacted us to let us know about a very cool animation that his company has built which provides a great visualization of the 2010 Hurricane Season. Based on the NOAA tropical cyclone track data, this file does a great job of showing all of the hurricanes in 2010.

The file is rather large (9.35MB), but includes fantastic imagery of the various stages of each storm. For example, here is a great image of Hurricane Danielle as it was heading toward Bermuda:

You can read more about this project on their site. To see it for yourself, you can use this KMZ file

or watch the video below:

NASA captures amazing image of Hurricane Paula

October 15, 2010

A few days ago, Hurricane Paula was bearing down on Honduras and Mexico. While it caused some substantial flooding and destroyed some homes, it weakened rather quickly and is now a tropical storm near Cuba.

However, three days ago as the storm was battering the coast of Honduras, NASA’s MODIS captured a stunning image of the hurricane.

Here is what NASA said about the image:

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of Hurricane Paula at 11:20 a.m. CDT (16:20 UTC) on October 12 while over the Caribbean Sea, just off the coasts of Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. Coiled around a distinct eye, the storm’s most intense clouds spanned roughly 200 kilometers (125 miles).

From their Earth Observatory “Image of the day”, you can download the image as a 6MB JPEG, or view it in Google Earth as an image overlay with this KMZ file.

The Image of the Day site showcases some amazing images. We’ve shown you some of them on here in the past, such as the Tempe Town Lake Drain and a cool series of images that showed the growth of Las Vegas from 1984-2009. I strongly suggest visiting the site from time to time to see what kind of great stuff they’re putting out.