Some guy left a comment pointing out that NWS Tulsa’s KML feed seemed to be missing (see Friday’s post), so I emailed the webmaster asking for a clarification for Ogle Earth. And I got one right away:

We did this purely as an experiment…knowing that our headquarters would likely ask us to remove this page from the NWS Tulsa website. And…yep…they asked us to remove it a few days ago. Didn’t want to give the impression that the NWS was parterning with Google. I’ll ask our IT if the KML files will be produced in the future.

There is also a potential project between us…the Huntsville office and NASA that may produce similar products.

Thanks for your concern.

Chuck Hodges

NWS Tulsa

That just seems to confirm the impression from Friday’s Slashdot thread that the NWS is full of geeks who can’t help but experiment with new technologies. But KML is just XML, and HQ in this case is being a bit overbearing — it’s akin to issuing a directive that no NWS documents can pe published as PDFs, to avoid the impression that the NWS is partnering with Adobe. (and they do publish PDFs, I checked.)