All of us go and explore the Earth after installing Google Earth (GE). But, some of the most interesting things are hard to find. Thankfully, thousands of other people want to share their finds with you. The hard part is finding the best.
The first place to look is at the Google Earth Community (it’s at the Keyhole site, since Keyhole was the original version of the product before Google bought Keyhole). You can find all kinds of interesting places by reading these forums. But, the format is kind of hard to use to delve through all the information and find the real gems.
Another good site is www.gearthhacks.com. At the time of this writing they have over 2000 entries and a nice “photo” gallery approach to showing interesting Google Earth places. I will be including these and other locations in my reference section soon.
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.
Click here to see the file itself from within GE.