Weather Radar in Earth.Google

I have posted about and referred many people I know towards the old keyhole trial and now as it is branded Earth.Google… This is a very interesting and novel application, which can have many uses both for business and for recreation.

However, the one item I immediately wanted to see was a real time link to weather data. Would that would be cool. Well it is, this site has tapped in to the database to generate real time weather data,

Real Time Weather Data
Note, the site may be slow, as it has gotten popular…

Development server is having difficulty keeping up with high levels of site traffic. Investigating migration to more stable production environment. Migration to Google Maps version 10 should fix some of the reported issues with Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

However the interesting thing I noticed on this site was on the bottom right hand corner of the page was a pull down to down a .KML file, which is an overlay for Google.Earth. This is what I have been looking for in regards to some of the weather data imports. Should only be a matter of time before someone has something truely wicked pieced together.

Choose your state, and download the .KML file. Then (as long as you have the Earth.Google client loaded, double-click on this file and it will load up the radar data into the application.

By default this is loaded in a temporary place, which you can then choose to save into your “my places” once you have done so you can then view the properties of the specific radar source and then change the update interval. The default is 5 minutes.

Links

Google Map Hacks – Weather Maps Blog
http://weathermaps.blogspot.com/2005/06/weather-maps.html

What is a KML File?

Probably the greatest technological advance in Google Earth is the patent pending Network Link(TM) mechanisms described by Google's Keyhole Markup Language(TM) specification. These Network Links allow individuals, businesses, governments, and other organizations to easily publish dynamic geospatial data layers and have them seamlessly integrated into the unified Google Earth environment where it will be seen by millions of users as they search the globe.

Keyhole Markup Language