I’m continuing to play around with Google Earth. The latest subject of study is creating my own dynamic data layers. Two posts ago, I talked about creating a QuickSCAT sea winds dynamic data layer. Since then, I’ve created a few others including a GEOS West IR winds layer. The GEOS satellite IR winds image shows winds at 100 MB - 400 MB (the “jet stream”), 401 MB - 700 MB (mid-level winds) and below 701 MB (near the surface). Of course, QuickSCAT measures winds at the surface (sea surface).

Over on the Google Earth dynamic data layers forum, I picked up the KMZ (compressed Keyhole markup language file) for a global cloud-cover layer.

Here’s an overlay of the QuickSCAT images layered with the GEOS IR winds. I’ve also added a few points to show the path of an early-season Gulf of Alaska storm. The cursor arrow in the image below is over the current position of the storm (near 50N 158W) as of Tuesday night. The storm is tracking east, and is about 2,000 miles from San Francisco with winds blowing down the 308 degree great circle path to The City.

Winds at the surface are blowing at nearly 50 kts near 50N 158W

This image overlays the IR winds on top of the global cloud-cover image.

Notice the clouds directly under the jet winds

This is a nice, fairly strong (for fall anyway) storm. It’s interesting to see the jet winds to the east of the storm’s center fueling the storm. Imaging made possible by the web, the US government and Google. Killa.

Wanna waste a bunch of time? Check out this Flickr hack that displays the closest Flickr photos in your Google Earth client. Here’s an example of this hack in action in a remote area of southeastern Utah. Really, really cool.

Clicking on the photos in Google Earth gives you the option to view the photo on Flickr.

Stuff like this really shows the potential of geo-coded pictures.

I’ve been messing around a bit with Google Earth and have been trying out some image overlays that I’ve found on their forums. If you are into weather, there are tons of dynamic radar maps, current world cloud cover images, hurricane tracking mpas, etc. Here’s a sample real-time cloud cover image of the Gulf of Mexico showing Hurricane Rita.

Hurricane Rita on 2005-09-22

However, one thing that I couldn’t find on the forums was an overlay file for the QuickSCAT sea wind satellite images. What is QuickSCAT?

The SeaWinds on QuikSCAT mission is a “quick recovery” mission to fill the gap created by the loss of data from the NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), when the satellite it was flying on lost power in June 1997. The SeaWinds instrument on the QuikSCAT satellite is a specialized microwave radar that measures near-surface wind speed and direction under all weather and cloud conditions over Earth’s oceans.

SeaWinds uses a rotating dish antenna with two spot beams that sweep in a circular pattern. The antenna radiates microwave pulses at a frequency of 13.4 gigahertz across broad regions on Earth’s surface. The instrument will collect data over ocean, land, and ice in a continuous, 1,800-kilometer-wide band, making approximately 400,000 measurements and covering 90% of Earth’s surface in one day.

Anyway, it’s pretty easy to roll your own Google Earth overlay. Simply find the URL of the image that you want to overlay, right click on My Places in the Places area of Google Earth and choose New/Image Overlay. Enter in the URL of the image into the appropriate box, and then check the Advanced menu to position the image. Positioning with the QuickSCAT images is pretty easy since they have longitude and latitude information right on the images.

The alignment isn’t perfect for these images (since they have a border), but it’s close enough. Here’s a sample of my work…

East Pacific QuickSCAT image for 2005-09-22

Ugh… I’m now of the opinion that Yahoo! Unlimited (Yahoo!’s subscription music service) is not worth the $60/year fee. In fact, I don’t even know if I’d use Yahoo! Unlimited for free.

The latest problem is that I can’t transfer music to any of my portable devices. Yahoo! Unlimited used to work with my Dell Axim, but now all I get is this error message. Fark!

Even that is better than the experience that I got trying to transfer songs to my SMT-5600 Audiovox Smartphone. Yes, this device is on Yahoo!’s “approved” list, but not for my computer system. I never got my Audiovox to work with the service.

Oh, then there are all the times that the music client crashes or hangs. That has the added benefit of bring down all of your IE windows. A nice bonus “feature.” And the client is slow, UI confusing, blah, blah, blah.

I’m going to start taking a look at Rhapsody Unlimited, and see if I can get some of my money back from Yahoo!.

P.S. Mr. Jobs, please come out with a subscription service that I can use with my soon-to-be-purchased Nano.

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I’m just trying to get Technorati to start indexing my blog again.