Tracking Hurricane Gustav in Google Earth

As menacing Hurricane Gustav approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast, we've added a "Hurricane Gustav" folder under the "Weather" folder in Google Earth.



Expand the folder to find the latest advisory from the National Hurricane Center, a forecast track (also from the NHC), and a set of webcams in and around Louisiana, provided to us by Weather Bonk. We may be adding more information into the folder as the situation unfolds.

Please keep in mind when tracking the storm in Google Earth that the "Clouds" layer is 1-3 hours behind "real time," so the storm is actually farther ahead than it looks. The "Radar" layer should be accurate within 15-30 minutes of real-time.

For more detailed data on the approaching storm, including individual images from various satellites, load this KML into Google Earth, produced by the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey.

The volunteer-run Gustav Information Center has embedded a map of Evacuation Centers & Routes on their site.

If you happen to be in one of the affected areas, please stay tuned to your local authorities for specific instructions.

Posted by Cris Castello, Google Earth Team

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Tip of the week: Lat Long on Lat/Long

Every now and then, we mention that you can do a search in Google Maps or Google Earth using latitude and longitude coordinates. But sometimes the coordinates are just what you're looking for, so here's a quick tip on how to find them. In Google Earth, browse over to the location for which you'd like to find the coordinates, then click on the "Add Placemark" button in the toolbar. This will automatically put a placemark in the center of the screen and open a dialogue box that shows you the coordinates for that spot, but you can also move the placemark to be able to pinpoint the exact coordinates of a specific location. To do so, click and drag the placemark; you'll notice that as you drag it, the latitude/longitude coordinates automatically update.

If you prefer showing instead of telling, here's a brief video tutorial that also explains obtaining coordinates:

Posted by Elaine Filadelfo, Lat Long Blog Team

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GPS trails in Google Earth

This week, we've added another layer to the Gallery in Google Earth. Spain-based Wikiloc aggregates thousands of GPS tracks for various outdoor activities provided by its growing user community. The layer not only lets you display the GPS tracks in Google Earth, but gives you additional information like the distance covered, the elevation maxima, a personal description of the trip as well as pictures taken by the user. This can be interesting to explore, and very helpful for illustrating a trip.

It's great fun to explore hiking trails in the Pyrenees or in the Andes, especially when you take advantage of the 3D terrain by tilting your view.

Or is water your preferred element? Then go to a Norwegian fjord and follow a kayak track or explore the Mediterranean Sea with a sailing boat.

You can find information on all sorts of outdoor activities, including ice climbing, ballooning, hang gliding, cave diving, dogsledding or cross-country skiing.

Posted by Carmen Erni, GIS Specialist, Google Zurich

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Just When You Think You've Seen It All...

Looks like it's time to replace that rickety compass with a few hundred of your favorite cattle. Ok, not that you would - but according to a team of German zoologists and the research they did using Google Earth, apparently you could. Using Google Earth's satellite imagery, these zoologists observed the grazing tendencies of thousands of cattle from hundreds of different herds around the world and concluded that the vast majority of these animals position themselves according to our planet's magnetic poles, facing almost due north or south. The zoologists were looking for a way to study magnetisim in large animals, so they turned to Google Earth to, well, steer them in the right direction. You can take a look for yourself and see what you think -- Frank Taylor at the Google Earth Blog was intrigued by this study, so he put together a KML of cow herds.  

We've heard some great stories of Google Earth being used for scientific research, but some scientists have also made some accidental discoveries while working with Google Earth. An Australian geologist now has a crater named in his honor after stumbling upon an odd formation in Google Earth -- take a look at Hickman Crater. Similarly, another Australian scientist was doing some research using Google Earth when he noticed an extremely rare coral reef formation. Over in Parma, Italy, our imagery allowed one user to learn that he lived on the site of an ancient Roman ruin!

So, to everyone exploring our world on Google Earth - well done!  And to compass makers around the world - looks like you might have some Grade-A competition.

Posted by Aaron Stein, Lat Long Blog Team

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From Google Maps to gold medal

My reconnaissance of the Beijing Olympic Time Trial all started in December 2007. My coach Jim Miller and I traveled to Beijing, China to not only check out and ride the Time Trial course, and to experience the heavily publicized pollution problem first hand. (During my Gold Medal ride, it turned out to be a perfect day in Beijing.)
 
Much of the hype with the course centered on how non-traditional this 15-mile course was, especially with the sheer amount of climbing involved. At the encouragement of my husband (a technology buff) I took along one of his GPS units so as to get an elevation profile. While riding the course,I kept thinking to myself that we must be on the wrong road; there is just simply no way a time trial would have this much climbing! At the reassurance from my coach and much to my delight we were on the right course. 
 
After returning home to Boise, Idaho, I exported the GPS data to several different formats, one of which I was able to launch with Google Earth. I was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise. This capability along with having the elevation profile proved invaluable in my preparation for my Gold Medal race. It was also very nice to be able to show family members and friends the course from the excellent satellite views presented by Google Earth.
 
With all the requests that I've been getting since winning the Gold, I've become hooked on my next cool tool find Google Calendar. My publicist/manager, agent, and I are constantly checking and blocking out times on my calendar so we needed a way to share calendars and of course that's never easy. Imagine my delight when I did a Google search for "calendars" and up pops Google Calendar -- another great tool!

Posted by Kristin Armstrong, Olympic Gold Medalist, Women's Individual Time Trial in Road Cycling

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Design Your Dwelling Competition: one week left!

(cross-posted from the SketchUp blog)

Just a reminder that the Design Your Dwelling competition is closing this Sunday, August 31st. If you haven't submitted your model yet, start by visiting the site location in Google Earth. Each model must be uploaded to the Google 3D Warehouse and be submitted through the Dwell entry form. The chosen design will win a trip to San Francisco (airfare and hotel accommodations included), have lunch with Dwell & SketchUp staff, attend the Dwell/AIA home tours and receive a physical model of their dream home. We can't wait to see what you come up with!

Posted by Tasha Danko, Marketing Functionary

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Tip of the week: Shortcuts

Here's a brief primer on some of the shortcuts you can use while browsing Google Maps. With your mouse, you can zoom in and out: double left-click to zoom in on the area you're clicking, and double right-click (also known as Ctrl+Click for Mac users) to zoom out. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can also use that to zoom in and out.

You can also zoom in and out with the "+" and "-" keys. There are some other keyboard shortcuts: with the arrow keys, you can pan left, right, up, and down with each respective arrow. Using the arrows moves the map just a tad, so to pan wider you can use the Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys to move north, south, east and west, respectively. Holding down any of these keys will keep the map scrolling across your screen. 

Street View also has some useful keyboard shortcuts. To pan left in an image, use the left arrow or "A" key; to pan right, use the right arrow or "D" key. The up arrow moves you forward down a street, and the down arrow will put you in reverse and move you backward. When you want to see the top of a skyscraper or a mountain peak, you can use the Page Up or "W" key; to pan back down (or check out our ground-filling), use the Page Down or "S" key. And the same tip of using the "+" and "-" keys to zoom in and out also applies.

Posted by Elaine Filadelfo, Lat Long Blog Team

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Map of champions

If you've been consoling yourself for not being in Beijing by jaunting around in the Google Maps 2008 Summer Games website, you'll find further comfort with this great mashup from Earthgamz.  Check out the placemarks for athletes' hometowns and training cities, which also link to their official profiles and schedules of their events.  Focus your browsing by country and sport with the popup menus.  This is a really cool Earth API application, but if you want to get even more immersed in the athletes' world you can download their US Team KML for the full Google Earth experience.  Maybe you heard that Shawn Johnson, gold medalist for balance beam, was the pride of Iowa (there's even a butter sculpture of her to prove it) -- yep, there's her placemark right in Des Moines. 

Posted by James Therrien, SketchUp Program Manager

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Tip of the week: Learning from Mapplets

As students prepare to head back to school, it seems like a good time to share some fun ways to use Mapplets to get students and curious minds interested in discovering new places. To start, you can grab their attention with dynamic 360º panoramas of cities throughout the world. Show them the Earth at night or take a visual tour of the 7 Wonders of the World. Now that you've got them hooked, integrate cool visuals with course curricula and informational maps, such as the amount of sea level rise.

To access these Mapplets and many others just go to Google Maps, click on My Maps and then click "Browse the Directory". You can use two or more at a time to try to find relationships between two things, such as energy consumption and world population density. And as we shared last week, you can easily link to your favorite Mapplets. Of course, you can also check out the Geo Education site for more resources.

Posted by Chris Wihlidal, Lat Long Blog Team

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Poetry, community, and forty fabulous islands

The poet John Donne once said, "No man is an island" - and for those of us who've had the opportunity to see our users map their world, we believe in the collective knowledge of communities sharing what they know best about the places where they've lived, visited, or explored.

Not too long ago, we announced the launch of Google Map Maker - a tool that allows users to build maps of their neighborhoods, cities and countries. Today, we're excited to open up Google Map Maker to forty island nations.

For those of you new to Google Map Maker, check out this brief tutorial about how it works:

Whether it's drawing roads, adding your favorite convenience store or bird-watching spot, or editing major landmarks, we hope to continue making Google Map Maker a platform for our users to share and benefit from the local knowledge of their peers. So if you're spending these months combing the beautiful beaches, towns and trails of the world's island nations, share your local knowledge with us on Google Map Maker.

Here's a shout-out to these forty island nations: American Samoa, Anguilla, Cape Verde, Cocos Islands, Comoros, Cook Islands, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Guam, Isle of Man, Kiribati, Madagascar, Maldives, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritius, Montserrat, Nauru, New Caledonia, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands, Papua New Guinea, Reunion, Samoa, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Micronesia, Christmas Island, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna.

I thought I'd leave you with a little poem our team came up with while hard at work on the fab forty launch:

Snorkeling in Maldives and Gyros in Cyprus,
Mauritius Fishing and Maltese History,
Sailing in Samoa and Camping in Tonga,
These are a few of our favorite things

As you can tell, we love islands and all the fun,
freedom and frolic they stand for. But they can
be more fun - with great maps.

Posted by Lalit Katragadda, Software Engineer

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Where is Georgia on Google Maps?

The recent conflict in Georgia has raised some questions about how Google Maps has handled mapping in that part of the world. The most obvious question is, why doesn't Google Maps show any cities or roads for Georgia, or its neighbors Armenia and Azerbaijan? The answer is we never launched coverage in those countries because we simply weren't satisfied with the map data we had available. We're constantly searching for the best map data we can find, and sometimes will delay launching coverage in a country if we think we can get more comprehensive data. Some of our customers have asked if we removed map data from any of these countries in response to the recent hostilities in that region and I can assure you that is not the case. Data for these countries were never on Google Maps in the first place.

But this has generated a lot of feedback that we are listening to and learning from. We're hearing from our users that they would rather see even very basic coverage of a country than see nothing at all. That certainly makes sense, and so we have started preparing data for the handful of countries that are still blank on Google Maps. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, as well as other significant regions of the world will benefit from this effort.

In the meantime, much of this data, including cities in Georgia and other surrounding countries, can be found in Google Earth.

Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager

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Google Earth Geographic Web updates

Organizing the world's spatial information means benefiting from the collective knowledge and experiences of people around the globe. Making this information universally accessible enables you to discover the world and its places, not only as they are, but as you make them. That's why we now have the "Places" layer. With this release, we've combined user-generated content from sources including Wikipedia, Panoramio, the Google Earth Community, and YouTube to create a single, multi-faceted layer. A single glance. Better understanding. Endless exploration.

In the main Google Earth 3-D view, look for an icon that looks like a stack of photos to find a Place to explore. You'll notice that we've also changed the icon for Panoramio photos (now represented by a smaller photo stack) and Wikipedia (now represented by a "W").


Each "Place" is a specific spot on Earth we think you'll find interesting (we gauge that interest level by noting much community content exists about that place). Click on a Place icon to see a bubble rich with relevant content about that place... flip through photos, play videos, and download KML files from the Google Earth Community. Here's the bubble for the Golden Gate Bridge:


We've also broadened our "Wikipedia" layer. As Wikipedia expands in breadth across languages, so do we! Google Earth's Wikipedia content will now match your Google Earth client's language for eighteen supported languages. If Swedish is your primary language, for instance, you'll be greeted with fully internationalized bubbles like this:



Posted by Cris Castello, Jason Shields and Daniel Calvelo Aros; GIS Data Engineers

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Off to the Games!

The 2008 Summer Games will soon commence in Beijing and will run from August 8th to August 24th. You may have noticed that we recently updated our satellite imagery in Beijing, have added detailed bilingual maps in China, and have created a collection of 3D stadiums using Google SketchUp.

In addition to all of this, today we're launching the 2008 Summer Games on Google Maps. It's a one-stop shop for viewing live updates from the Games, including up-to-date medal counts by country, events by date, and results by sport.

To track medal counts, click on the 'Medals' tab and zoom or pan the map to see updates around the world. Clicking on a country or region will display medal information as it's received. Use the 'Events' tab to view the latest schedules by date, country, and sport. All data--including country and region participants, sport results, and medal counts--is provided through an official feed from the World News Press Agency (WNPA).

As a bonus, we've also included a way to view sports stadiums and venues in 3D. By clicking the 'Earth' tab, PC users can access the Google Earth plug-in and virtually explore the Beijing Village. Not a PC user? No problem. All users are also able to preview the venue information and 3D fly-through videos within the map.

If you'd rather follow the Games from your desktop, we've launched a Google Earth KML that highlights similar information and provides a unique virtual experience. To whet your palate, here's a video tour of the 3D Village:

Posted by Brittany Bohnet, Google Maps Special Projects

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Tip of the week: Link directly to a Mapplet

Have you ever found a Mapplet you really wanted to share? You might have tried the "link" feature on Maps, and been frustrated that it only links to the My Maps tab instead of directly to whichever Mapplet you selected. Well, there is in fact a simple method to link directly to a Mapplet, and it will even get rid of the Mapplets interface typically shown in the My Maps tab.

The trick is to construct a URL in the following format:

http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=[insert URL to Mapplet XML]

You can get the URL from the 'View source' link on a Mapplet's page:


For example, the following URL will send you directly to the USGS Earthquake Mapplet:

http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/mapplets/earthquakes.xml

This gives you the ability to link directly to Google Maps and keep your user interface front and center - I'm looking forward to seeing how you use it.

Posted by Abe Murray, Product Manager

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More streets in more places

Earlier this summer we launched our first international Street View coverage with the Tour de France route. Today I'm excited to announce we're bringing Street View to new corners of the globe as we launch imagery in Japan and Australia.

Our Japan launch includes a number of major cities including Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, among others across the country.

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View Larger Map

Our imagery for Australia includes extensive coverage throughout the country, featuring cities such as Sydney, Perth, and Melbourne - and many places in between. Here's a slideshow of some images from around Australia:

As if that was not enough, we're also extending our coverage in the US with over 30 new cities including New Orleans (LA), Baton Rouge (LA), El Paso (TX), Wichita (KS), Savannah (GA), and Colorado Springs (CO). And to give you even more of a reason to explore Street View, we've hidden a special surprise somewhere in our US imagery so keep your eyes peeled as you take in the views!

Posted by Stephen Chau, Product Manager

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Olympic imagery update

I'm very pleased to announce that we've published brand new imagery of Beijing in time for the Olympics, and that some of the new imagery is less than 2 weeks old! Everyone on the imagery team is very excited to make this data available to you just before the start of the games; it's very hard to get good satellite photos of Beijing due to clouds and other atmospheric conditions, but our partners GeoEye and DigitalGlobe pulled through and were able to get us some really amazing shots. Some updated areas include Beijing, Tianjin, Shenyang, and Quindao -- you can check out the new data in both Google Earth and Google Maps.

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Posted by Matt Manolides, GIS Specialist

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