I’ve been messing around a bit with “Google Earth”:1 and have been trying out some image overlays that I’ve found on their “forums”:2. 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.

However, one thing that I couldn’t find on the forums was an overlay file for the QuickSCAT sea wind satellite “images”:3. What is QuickSCAT?

bq.. 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.

p. 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…

[3(QuickSCAT image home)]http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/quikscat/

[2(Google Earth Forums)]http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/categories.php/Cat/0

[1(Google Earth Home)]http://earth.google.com