hurricane

Tracking the weather with Google Earth

May 9, 2014

With severe storms again rolling across the central US, I thought it’d be a good time to revisit the ways that Google Earth can help you track the weather.

Google Earth has a variety of built-in layers that give you some amazing ways to view the current weather around the world. Simply by turning on the [Clouds] and [Radar] layers inside of the main [Weather] layer, you can get a great look at clouds and precipitation around the world.

If you dive below the clouds you’ll find a few nice touches. First, the clouds/radar are not on the surface of the earth, but up an an elevation of approximately 35 miles. Also, if you fly under an area that is currently raining or snowing (and you have an adequate video card) you’l actually see animated rain/snow on your screen.

You can also use the weather layer to help track hurricanes, as we showed you in the past with storms such as Hurricane Isaac.

Finally, for those that wish to dig a little deeper, we have our popular collection of weather tools that give you a variety of other weather-related data to explore.

Hurricane Irene in Google Earth

August 24, 2011

Hurricane Irene, which has already done some serious damage to Puerto Rico, was recently captured in stunning high resolution by NASA’s Terra satellite as it heads toward the east coast of the United States.
[UPDATE: We’ve posted more tools for tracking Hurricane Irene]

You can view the image on NASA’s Earth Observatory website, or view it in Google Earth using this KML file.

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

Be aware the KML is loading the full 5 MB file from NASA’s server, as it’s amazingly sharp, so it’ll take a few moments to load.
To track the Hurricane and view its forecasted track, turn on your Places layer and an icon will appear over the Hurricane. Clicking that icon will give you access to details about the Hurricane, along with historical data and various projected paths. More details about this feature can be found in this post from a few months ago.
If you’re aware of other great tools to help track Irene and other 2011 hurricanes, leave a comment below and let us know.

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.