KenMankoff

Vertical Data in Google Earth

Google Earth does not officially support vertical curtains of data. However, it does support buildings with images on the side. If you are willing to stretch the definition of a building, you can put any vertical data you like into KML. This implementation was inspired by the Goddard Earth Science (GES) Data and Information Service Center (DISC) sample files for CloudSat, CALIPSO, and Aqua.

If you use IDL and would like to image your data in Google Earth, be it points, lines, regions, surface images, or vertical data, you should be using my IDL interface to the KML API.

Vertical Data in Google Earth

Earthquakes

I came across a database of earthquakes from 1960 to almost present. I converted it from the existing form to KML so it can be seen in both Google Earth and Google Maps. Both views incorporate a temporal component.

For the Google Earth view, magnitude as been encoded as pin size and depth has been encoded as height above the Earth. A few interesting regions where the deep quakes occur, such as east of the Andes, pop out.

Earthquakes

GISTEMP.StationData

NASA GISS has recently announced another year of the surface temperature trends. Last year, 2009, tied for the 2nd warmest year on record, and the past decade (January 2000 to December 2009) was the warmest on record.

I took the time this weekend to re-create a Google Earth layer showing these data. This visualization allows you to see a broad geospatial overview, and then select any particular location and see both long-term trends and even the data point for each individual month.

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GISTEMP.StationData

GISTEMP.StationData

KDM-IDL Code Library

I have spent quite a bit of time developing IDL code in the past, and it appears I will do some more in the near-term future. I have decided to release my IDL code library to the public so that others can perhaps benefit from my work. This is a work-in-progress and access is via Subversion.

One subset of the library is the KDM_KML lib for writing KML files. This code should make it fairly simple to display data sets in Google Earth from IDL.

I have currently implemented about 50% of the KML API and will get the rest implemented as time goes on. Right now layers can have overlays, points (placemarks), or linestrings (paths). Any element (that the API supports) can have a timestamp, and styles are supported too. With knowledge of the KML API you can create artistic balloons with whatever content you like that can even link to each other.