Google Earth: First northern winter

It’s been nearly 5 months since Google Earth’s release (on the PC), and winter is upon us in the northern hemisphere. Providing information about ski resort conditions sounds like a natural candidate for Google Earth/Maps enhancement, and now the good folks behind www.vlogmap.org have come out with ridertech.com, which offers video reviews of conditions in the north-western US, live webcams where available, weather updates and a geographic database viewable with both Maps and Earth.

With the level of detail that Google Earth affords (and also the ability to depict slopes in 3D), I can imagine future versions of this database breaking down the data to the level of individual ski runs, mapping them, annotating them socially, and offering live conditions, perhaps with hi-res overlays provided by the resorts themselves. Google could become an integral planning tool to any ski outing, especially if resorts step up with a willingness to provide geographic data for the consumption of sites like ridertech.

2 thoughts on “Google Earth: First northern winter”

  1. Inspired by Frank (from GEarthBlog.com), I just added a custom snowflake icon. Even better, I added image overlays for snow forecast from Weather.com

    Now we can see exactly which resorts are expected to get snow!

  2. As a keen skier, I cannot imagine why this did not occur to me earlier. At the very least, a comprehensive overlay of ski slope web cams for all ski areas would be a fine addition to my collection of Google Earth network links. Is anyone already working on this at all?

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