UK Met Office & British Antarctic Survey launch climate change KML
Both Reuters and 24dash.com report on a British initiative to better visualize the effects of global climate change using Google Earth. The project was launched today by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Google Zeitgeist conference, and involves two new KML files for Google Earth: One made by the British Antarctic Survey showing the effects of climate change on the ice shelves of Antarctica, and another made by the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre containing timeline-based overlays and popups showing likely temperature changes.
Neither article manages to link to the layers, nor to the speech by Gordon Brown, so without further ado, all the links you need are right here:
Met Office KML file at Google Outreach
Met Office’s special page on their KML file (which manages not to link to the KML file)
British Antarctic Survey KML file at Google Outreach
BAS’s special page about their KML file
Video of UK PM Brown’s speech today at the Google Zeitgeist conference outside London.
These layers are not available in Google Earth by default (yet?) so you do need to download then via the links above if you want to explore them.
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ConnoteaLinks: KML presentation videos, Google Earth lit crit
- KML presentations on video: On April 23, the Geophysical Institute and Arctic Region Supercomputing Center hosted a symposium about use of KML by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Now the videos of the presentations are online. UAF’s John E. Bailey writes:
We now have some videos online from our "KML in the North" event:
You might especially like Michael Weiss-Malik's talk on "Why KML matters". Also, the Kate Riffey and Zach Meyers presentations were from two of the students in my Google Earth class this past semester. They were presenting their class KML-based projects.... previous to the class they had no knowledge of KML. - Google Earth lit crit: I had read the start of a review of Joseph O’Neill’s new book ‘Netherland’ in the International Herald Tribune a few days ago, but stopped when the reviewer was less than laudatory. (Life is short). Luckily Brian Timoney persevered, and mailed me to point out this passage in the review:
O’Neill knows how to deploy the quotidian fripperies of our laptop culture to devastating fictional effect. There’s a moment in “Netherland” involving a father, the son who has been taken from him, and Google Earth that’s among the most moving set pieces I’ve read in a recent novel. The father hovers over his son’s house nightly, “flying on Google’s satellite function,” lingering over his child’s dormer window and blue inflated swimming pool, searching the “depthless” pixels for anything, from thousands of miles away, he can cling to. O’Neill’s novel is full of moments like this: closely observed, emotionally racking, un-self-consciously in touch with how we live now.
More proof if you need it that Google Earth has firmly ensconced itself in the mainstream mindset as a revelatory technology:-) Luckily, a review in the New York Times does rave about ‘Netherland’, which is good, as now I am looking for an excuse to read it.
Links: Sola G2, DIY sensor web, ArcGIS Explorer gets GeoRSS support
- SOLA G2, 3D file to KML converter: Perhaps you remember, way back in 2006, the release of the SOLA converter, which took W3D, 3DS, DXF and OBJ files and turned them into to KML. Now, just released, is SOLA G2 which converts even more 3D file formats into accurately positioned KML. Free for personal use, $50 for commercial use.
- DIY sensor web: Very cool DIY sensor web project warns of forest fires, with sensor states mapped in real time on Google Earth.
- GE Imagery update: Lots of new satellite imagery for developing countries (my favorite kind :-) Details below the fold.
- Virtual Earth for China: Virtual Earth releases a new version of its mapping product for inside the Great Chinese firewall. It now includes an API. I was intrigued to notice that, just as with Google’s Chinese mapping product, Virtual Earth for China is completely devoid of satellite imagery.
- Where 2.0: Plenty of blogging from Where 2.0, nicely aggregated on Planet Geospatial, so I’m not going to engage in second-hand reporting here. My big-picture takeaway is this one big trend: Increasingly sophisticated and deeper access to geodatabases via better APIs and via the adoption of KML as an output standard crawled by Google. API-wise, we’re not just talking Yahoo and Google, but also smaller community oriented players like Rhiza Labs. As for adopting KML, ESRI’s ArcGIS content will automatically be made accessible to Google’s crawlers as KML, and so will GeoServer’s. To resort to a cliche, the buzzword is seamless integration.
- Where 2.0 question: Did Lisa Parks’ presentation really leave a good impression on people at Where 2.0? A talk by her 6 weeks ago appeared to be completely loopy.
- ArcGIS Explorer to do GeoRSS: ArcGIS Explorer gets GeoRSS support. Microsoft Virtual Earth also has GeoRSS support. Why is Google Earth still holding out?
Continue reading "Links: Sola G2, DIY sensor web, ArcGIS Explorer gets GeoRSS support"
Sichuan earthquake dam collection
You may have heard the concern about damaged dams in Sichuan province after the recent strong earthquake there. CNN reports that Chinese authorities say almost 400 dams have been damaged. One in particular, the Zipingpu Dam near Dujiangyan City, has severe cracks, but the water level there has now been lowered to safe levels (according to authorities).
Dr. Mark Mulligan, of the Environmental Monitoring and Modelling Research Group at King's College London, writes in:
In the light of the concern over dams in the Earthquake affected area in China we have released the (unvalidated) recently collected dams locations for the area around the quake. These points were digitised by Leonardo Saenz Cruiz using the dams geowiki. The KMZ link is accessible from this page. Nothing fancy, just the point locations of the dams.
You too can contribute to the geowiki of dams via the above page. In case you’re wondering, the Zipingpu Dam is here and the earthquake epicenter is here.
[Update 16.53 UTC: The Wall Street Journal's China Journal has some interesting context about the dams.]
Microsoft WorldWide Telescope: The review
Microsoft WorldWide Telescope (WWT) requires Windows XP or Vista on a well-specced computer. Rather than go through the hassle of installing Windows via Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro, I ended up requisitioning my flatmate’s current model HP Vista laptop for the day, and was thus able to put WWT through its paces. The following is not meant as an instruction manual, but rather a discussion of WWT’s strengths and weaknesses, especially in comparison with Google Sky.
My initial impression stands: WWT is a wonderful piece of software that excels at rendering Earth’s view of the universe onto the screen in a beautiful and compelling way. But it also has a set of more advanced features that should make amateur astronomers very happy.
It takes a few minutes to get used to the user interface, after which it feels very intuitive.
From the menu top bar, you can observe objects in the sky by either exploring object collections, following a guided tour or by doing a search.
Select a collection and you see a strip of thumbnails representing objects; click on one and WWT will navigate to it and smoothly zoom in. If instead you select a guided tour, WWT downloads a scripted tour of objects, often with screen overlays and a voiceover, that lets you sit back and let an expert show you around the sky.
Search is “live”: Start typing the catalogue number of an object, like NGC4... and WWT already begins returning all NGC objects whose number component starts with 4. As you continue typing, the list of objects is whittled down. But if you search returns multiple objects, you can opt to plot them all. It leads to all sorts of serendipitous results.
WWT also gives you integrated search on the SIMBAD astronomical database (Search > SIMBAD Search), which is like the Oxford English Dictionary of astronomical objects. Neither Google Sky nor WWT will find UGC 9350 for you via their normal search, but a SIMBAD search in WWT sends you directly there. That’s a boon for amateur astronomers.
You can of course choose to browse the sky by dragging it around in the main window; the scroll button lets you to zoom in and out. Right click on the sky to bring up the “finder scope”, a floating window that tells you what you are looking at.
Perhaps the coolest features are in the bottom strip. On the right is an essential tool for getting your bearings in the night sky — it gives you an idea of how far zoomed in you are, and of which part of the sky you are looking at.
On the bottom left there is a dynamically created thumbnail collection of nearby interesting objects and alternate views of the current object in focus. This is an interesting and usdeful dynamic proximity-based navigation tool, and it makes exploring a region of the sky quite addictive.
You can even access this dynamic list in the middle of a guided tour: I pressed pause on a slide showing NGC 2207 in a guided tour of colliding galaxies, browsed the galaxy in some alternate wavelengths using the dynamic thumbnail collection, then pressed play to continue the tour.
Also on the bottom strip, you can choose from a long list of alternate base imagery datasets — from the default visible light to infrared, microwave, x-ray and much more.
One feature that is bound to be of interest to amateur astronomers is that WWT lets you download source imagery for any part of the sky. Sure, you can save a screenshot just like in Google Sky (View > Copy Current View to Clipboard) but you can also, for any object, right click on its thumbnail for a link to downloadable imagery from the Space Telescope’s Digitized Sky Survey. It’s a small detail, but one that makes printing out cheat sheets for star parties so much simpler.
How does all this compare to the Google Sky component of Google Earth? WWT is a dedicated sky browser, and the advantages are apparent: There are no odd singularities at the poles, and the user interface is optimized for navigating the sky. The tour function lets professional astronomers impart their knowledge in an immersive and hence compelling way. WWT’s database contains a huge amount of selectable pre-made overlays of specific objects, often at many different wavelengths, making comparisons easy and intuitive. (Check out M104 for a great example.) The overall feel is one of remarkable smoothness and an efficient dissemination of a wealth of information.
Still, WWT is not a complete slam-dunk when compared to Google Sky. WWT’s imagery downloads more slowly that Google Sky over the same bandwidth, so you have to wait longer for objects to become sharp. (Tours can take a really long time to download.) WWT only runs on Windows XP and Vista, so it can’t be a universal browser like Google Sky, which also runs on Mac and Linux.
This is a pity, because one cool feature of WWT is the ability to generate a permalink to any object in its database (like the two examples above). Just right click on the object’s thumbnail, choose “Copy Shortcut”, and you can then link to it on the web. Unfortunately, you have to have WWT installed for this to work, and since many people cannot install WWT, it’s a feature that will not enjoy the same universal usability as a KML file pointing to the same place.
KML support is another mark in Google Sky’s favor. The reason is not so much that KML is an emerging standard for sky object references (and an official standard for geospatial content). Rather, it’s that despite a lot of searching I found no way in WWT to create an overlay containing my own accurately positioned imagery, much like I did in Google Sky with KML to depict a recent gamma ray burst.
WWT does let you create your own guided tours, which can then be shared or submitted to a community. But you can only add imagery to a guided tour as a screen overlay — not anything anchored to the sky. It is possible to open an accurately positioned image in WWT (Explore > Open > Image) but only if your image already contains Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM), whose functionality is similar to that of a GeoTIFF for Earth. If your image contains no AVM metadata (none of mine do), then there is no way of manually positioning it in the sky in WWT. The upshot is that despite my best efforts, I could not create a guided tour in WWT whose functionality was equivalent to the KML I had made of the gamma ray burst.
Another way of putting this is that WWT provides tools for letting astronomy professionals present their knowledge to the masses — they will have access to AVM-savvy imagery and applications. Google Sky, just like Google Earth, is more geared towards letting the masses produce content for the masses, providing the tools to enable this.
The above observations come with a caveat, of course: WWT is a beta, so perhaps future versions will indeed see KML support and tools for importing and positioning imagery into collections and guided tours. (Microsoft Research’s own MapCruncher would work wonders here.) And if WWT were to get KML support, perhaps Google Sky might reciprocate with support for shared WWT collections? One wish likely to remain unfulfilled is a version of WWT for Mac.
One thing that surprised me is that neither WWT or Google Sky can lay claim to consistently better imagery. I ended up comparing two small regions quite by random, and in one case Google Sky had the better base imagery, while in the other case it was WWT. For example, look at NGC 5675 in Google Sky:
Which is much more detailed than NGC 5675 in WWT: [UPDATE: See comments below for a clarification]
But here’s NGC 182 in WWT:
Which has subtler gradiations than NGC 182 in Google Sky:
I don’t have the stamina to make a comparison of the entire sky:-) but the upshot is that if you have a specific object you want to look at, it is worth checking out both Google Sky and WWT. If there is going to be a race between Google and Microsoft for ever more detailed sky imagery, just as with their Earth imagery, then I’m all for it:-)
Some more notes on WWT:
- Communities: WWT lets you join different communities from within the application, where you can download additional content or tours and eventually submit your own for inclusion. Both Astronomy Magazine and Sky & Telescope already have communities up, and they are busy adding tours.
- Virtual globes: In addition to showing datasets for the sky, WWT can also show you virtual globes. These additional capabilities are not a complete success. The Earth, rendered in 3D, is clad in Virtual Earth tiles, leading to a somewhat ironic situation: Whereas Google Earth is a dedicated Earth browsing application with a sky feature as an afterthought, WWT is a dedicated sky browsing application with an Earth feature as an afterthought.
Many of the planets are also available rendered in 3D, but here I feel that the best application for viewing this type of content remains Celestia, which is dedicated to precisely this kind of visualization. (and Celestia is multiplatform.) One exception: The Mandelbrot Set on a globe Easter egg is extremely cool. - Panoramas: You can view gigapixel panorama photos in WWT — some early examples are shots from the Mars rovers. These are gorgeous, but since these pictures are taken from a specific location on Mars, I think the best way of showing them will come when it is possible to embed gigapixel panoramas on the surface of a future virtual Mars globe, in a manner similar to how you can view georeferenced panoramas in Google Earth today.
- Telescope Control: One feature of WWT that looks amazing but which I am not at all set up to test is the ability of WWT to control a (sufficiently sophisticated) telescope. Find a nice object in WWT? Then let your telescope slew over so you can take a look at it for yourself for real. I think that’s how I’ll spend my retirement:-)
Nitpick:[Update: See comments for a solution] Finally, a small nitpick I hope a future version of WWT fixes: Different thumbnails of the same object displaying different positioned overlays of it often are linked to slightly different coordinates, so clicking between views leads WWT to pan and zoom, when really all I want it to do is switch between overlays of the same object to compare them. If I’m not making myself clear, you’ll see what I mean as soon as you’ve played a bit with WWT.
To conclude, Microsoft WorldWide Telescope is an impressive piece of programming and a real pleasure to use. It’s fantastic to see such a capable new application added to the pantheon of great free educational software, though I do yearn for the day when all applications are built using multi-platform codebases. I hope WWT soon supports astronomical KML files, and that it becomes easier to add user generated content to an otherwise great touring function. I’ll be going back to my Mac now and Google Sky, which remains good enough to sate my astronomical urges, but I suspect I’ll borrow my flatmate’s Vista machine from time to time just to lose myself for a few hours in a serene and polished sky.
Where 2.0 Links, Day 1
- O’Reilly Radar has highlights from the keynotes.
- GeoServer 1.7.0 will make its geocontent automatically crawlable by Google’s crawler
- All Points Blog ranks company announcements according to their potential impact.
- Google Earth Blog covers John Hanke’s presentation.
If I detect a trend it’s a good one: Google and Yahoo are both opening up access to their geodatabases. Dan Catt’s been explaining how you can now query Yahoo’s database for a landmark or location and get all manner of related geodata back. (James Fee likes it.) John Hanke’s announcement doesn’t sweat the details, but more news about Google’s GeoSearch API is apparently forthcoming soon.
Syria reactor: ISIS report points to late discovery
ISIS (a nuclear-non proliferation watchdog that has already been much sourced on Ogle Earth) has just released a detailed report on the alleged nuclear reactor site in Syria bombed by Israel in September 2007. If like me you can’t get enough of the way in which civilians have had a front-row seat for seeing the available evidence analysed, then this report is well worth a read.
The report contains an interesting revelation: Unlike previous media reports that the site had been under satellite surveillance since 2001, it now appears that it wasn’t discovered until 2005, and that its purpose was a mystery until 2007, when Israel presented the CIA with evidence we recently saw in the CIA video presentation. Nut graphs:
According to U.S. government experts, U.S. intelligence had determined in 2005 that Syria and North Korea were involved in a project in the province Dayr az Zawr. However, the nature of the cooperation and the location of the site remained unknown. However, suspicions based on earlier obtained information, pointed to some type of nuclear activity taking place in this province.
The 2005 assessment led to an intensified imagery search, which resulted in the discovery of a large unidentified building near the town of Al Kibar. According to a U.S. government expert, it was “odd and in the middle of nowhere,” but analysts could not ascribe the building with a nuclear character, and U.S. intelligence labeled it an “enigma facility.” In the spring of 2007, the building was determined to be the covert nuclear reactor based on photos acquired by U.S. intelligence, reportedly from Israel, that showed the inside and outside of the building. [...]
Because of its late detection of the Al Kibar reactor, Israel felt compelled to strike the site militarily.
What’s interesting is that given the late discovery of this building, it would have been entirely possible for a Google Earth user to have found the unusual construction first and annotated it in Google Earth Community, were it not for the fact that Google Earth’s imagery of the region happened to be low resolution until late 2007.
India security services find new threat: Google Maps API sites
It’s been a few months since the more paranoid elements in India’s government have acted regarding Google's mapping services, so it’s about time that we get another volley, this time aimed at sites that use the Google Maps API, like Wikimapia. An article by India’s Times Now manages to get this news across, together with some hilarious mixed metaphors:
The government is worried over several websites that give detailed, high resolution images of some of the country's top secret nuclear installations. In a country that has suffered series of terror attacks, high resolution pictures of sensitive installations on the website implies a glaring security loophole, which cannot be ignored. In a bid to unplug the security loophole, various ministries are likely to meet with intelligence agencies on Tuesday (May 13).
[...] For example, the website -- www.wikimapia.com -- gives you a high resolution bird's-eye-view of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) -- and on clicking zoom in, you can see everything right from the nuclear reactor to the radiological laboratory.
Pakistan’s Daily Times, reporting the same news, seems to be under the impression that while Google Earth has censored some imagery of India as a result of requests by India’s government, sites like Wikimapia are taking Google’s place by continuing to make sensitive information available. This is wrong on two counts. Google has not degraded any imagery over India (that false meme borne from wishful thinking in India’s media was debunked back in 2006), and since wikimapia.com uses the Google Maps API, it has the exact same base layer as Google Earth.
The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is indeed annotated in Wikimapia, but it’s also immediately visible by doing a search for it in Google Earth. With the results of crowdsourced intelligence gathering now being distributed across multiple sites (not just Google Earth Community anymore) it is high time that India’s security services learn to operate under the assumption that there are satellites watching overhead (just like everybody else’s security services do) rather than futilely trying to constrain information already out in the public domain.
Microsoft WorldWide Telescope already here, stunning
Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope ("Spring Beta") has just launched and is available for download for Windows XP and Vista. I was able to take it for a quick spin on a very underpowered system before it crashed but even so it left a truly stunning impression. This is an amazing tool. If you have a well-specced Windows machine (not Parallels or VMWare on the Mac like me) then drop everything and lose yourself in this for the next few hours.
Compared to Google Sky, you can really see the advantage of a building a dedicated astronomical browsing tool. I have to agree with Scoble (much as I hate to :-) — this is easily the most impressive thing I've seen Microsoft do in a long time, and it stands head and shoulders above the competition. It may even force me to go back and reinstall Windows on my Mac via Boot Camp, because I suspect that's the only way I am going to get to use this application. (Thanks Jonathan for the heads up)
DishPointer.com
What use is all that fancy 3D building stuff in Google Earth? Well, for one, it can help you find out if you are in the line of site of a particular geostationary television satellite. DishPointer.com has just created a really innovative use of Google Earth’s increasingly accurate rendering of urban cityscapes: Not only will the site calculate the direction you need to point your dish at to catch a certain satellite from your location on Earth, it will now also draw the line of sight for you in Google Earth, and show you if it cuts through nearby buildings (in which case you’d be out of luck).
Here’s how it works: Enter your address on DishPointer.com and choose a satellite. You get back a Google Map with the relevant dish setup data.
(Move the marker to fine-tune.) But Google Maps can’t show you 3D buildings, which is why just below the map you can now open the view in Google Earth. The resulting KML file draws the exact line of sight from your location to the satellite.
As you can see above, in case you wanted set up a satellite dish beside Trinity Church on Wall Street, you’d be out of luck.
You can zoom out all the way until you see the satellite yourself.
My one big feature request: I’d like to be able to set the height above ground that my dish finds itself at. Many dishes are are not at ground level but on the roof of an apartment complex, and this matters in line-of-sight calculations. Still, Dishpointer.com's use of Google Earth is a really novel idea.
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