GOOGLE EARTH log
October 2006

I made some test mashups with the new time function in Google Earth 4 (beta). These mashups use global data from AMNH, NASA, and UMD. The Google time function allows you to play or scrub through data in time.


GETTING STARTED:

1. Check that you have the latest version of Google Earth 4! You must have this version of Google Earth to use the time function.

2. Once you have Google Earth, you can right-click the links below to download the KML mashup files, then double-click the downloaded file to see the mashup.

3. You probably won't be able to see all the images until the entire timeline plays through at least once-- Google needs time to load remote images to the cache.



HERE ARE THE KML FILES:
(be sure to right-click them and save. If you're using Safari, delete the ".txt" extension from the end of the file name.)

- BlueMarble
This script pulls the monthly blue marble images from Earth Observatory. We have this stuff on the shared drive, but I wanted to try pulling stuff from a remote source.

- UMD SummedAnnualNPP
NPP land data from University of Maryland. They keep their stuff on an FTP site, which Google Earth won't accept right now (as far as I can tell). So I had to copy the files and put them on an HTTP site.

- AMNH Ozone
Uses our Ozone images.

- Global Biosphere
Because this script uses a lot of big images from NASA, it takes a long time (maybe 20 minutes?) to load. But it's beautiful when it finally is loaded! I like to turn on Google's built-in political borders and zoom in close.

- MODIS Swaths Ocean
This script runs like crap, and is an example of how at this point, it's not that feasible to composite multiple images with alpha in Google Earth. You can tell this is happening because the animation gets more an more bogged down as it plays through. The images are from NASA.




MORE RESOURCES
(no need to right click, these links lead to other web sites)

- After I started playing with this stuff it hit me that NASA SVS has converted almost all their data into Google Earth format!!! Doh!

- Nature Magazine has a really nice Avian Flu Tracker. It also has some really nice analysis of Google Earth's role as a science tool, and best of all, the reporter who made the Avian Flu Tracker blogs the technical process of making the mashup.

- Another blog that helps explain the Google Earth time function.

- This blog helped, too.

- Then there's the Google Earth Community.

- And of course, most helpful of all, are the Google Earth User Guide and Scripting Guide.


SOME PERL SCRIPTS
I made these scripts to generate the kml files above... but they're sloppily written! And they have some errors, which I just ignored and corrected by hand in the kml files. If you really want to use them (or modify them), let me know and I'll clean them up.

- OceanGranules_ModErrors, MODIS swaths Ocean.

- UMD_GLCF_SummedAnnualNPP

- Ozone_AMNH