I’m continuing to play around with Google Earth. The latest subject of study is creating my own “dynamic data layers”:2. 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”:1 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”:4 forum, I picked up the KMZ (compressed Keyhole markup language file) for a “global cloud-cover layer”:5.

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”:3 path to The City.

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

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.

[5(Google Earth post on global cloud cover)]http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php?Cat=0&Board=EarthExternalData&Number=39778&fpart=&PHPSESSID=

[3(Wikipedia on the great circle)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle

[2(Google Forums on dynamic data layers)]http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/34858/an/0/page/0#34858

[4(Google Earth forums for dynamic data layers)]http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/postlist.php/Cat/0/Board/EarthExternalData

[1(GEOS West images)]http://www.goes.noaa.gov/WINDS/windsNHIRW.html