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Posts Tagged ‘Hurricanes’

MODIS Satellite Gallery

November 24th, 2009 1 comment

The collection contains over 2,200 satellite images obtained from NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites overlaid onto Google Earth. These satellite capture excellent natural color imagery in amazing detail from all over the Earth. NASA posts some of the most interesting imagery collected from these satellites several times per week at the MODIS Gallery. NASA also has a MODIS Image of the Day web page, and a RSS Feed if you want to keep up on the daily postings.

The images typically show major events occurring in the world that are visible from space. Dust storms, hurricanes, tropical storms, volcanic eruptions and wildfires are just some of the events captured by the satellites.

One of the shortcomings of the NASA gallery is it lacks a nice user-friendly index for Google Earth. So that’s what I have created for this post. Simply download the KML file from beneath the screenshot and you will get an index sorted by year of all (well…almost all) the MODIS Gallery images from 2003 through 2009. Each image is represented by a placemark and description of the image. Click on the placemark, then click on the blue hyperlink in the pop-up balloon to load the image into Google Earth. Most of the images are around 1 to 5 megabytes, so it might take them a minute or two to load. If you get a Red X, that probably means the image was too large for your computer to download.

About 10% of the images were not indexed by NASA for Google Earth for various reasons (size of image, wrong projection, etc.), which unfortunately includes all imagery near the north and south poles. Also, the quality of the image as you see it in Google Earth might vary depending on how much video memory you have available since these are large JPG files and have not been tiled into SuperOverlays.

I will try to update the index a couple times per year.

Hurricane Gulf of Mexico

Download With Google Earth

Credits

Google Earth Library

MODIS Rapid Response Project at NASA/GSFC

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Tropical Atlantic Weather Data

March 14th, 2009 No comments

An enormous  number of other weather-related overlays, including dozens (if not 100’s) of near real-time satellite overlays and loops, including everything from infrared images to sea surface temperatures to precipitation data to ocean wave graphs compiled by Tropical Atlantic.  There are too many to list, but if you’re interested in weather related satellite data, odds are you’ll find it included in this collection.  A detailed list of the data included is at their website.

In addition,  the collection includes real-time data (air pressure, wind speed, rain rate, wind direction, etc.) from the hurricane hunter aircraft while they fly missions in the Atlantic Ocean. The Tropical Atlantic website also has an archive of mission data dating back to 2007 and a detailed tutorial to help interpret the data.

Atlantic Weather

Download With Google Earth

Credits

Tropical Atlantic

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2007 Hurricane Katrina

December 17th, 2007 No comments

Update 11/2009

This archive of Hurricane Katrina data has been removed.  The aerial photographs of New Orleans shortly after the flooding can now be found using the historical imagery in Google Earth.  The MODIS satellite imagery of Katrina can still be found using the MODIS Satellite Gallery.  Much of the other data previously contained in this archive was hosted on other websites and is no longer available.

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