Geography Awareness Week

Posted by Cathy Tang, Project Lead

Which country is home to the world's oldest lake? Where is harissa (a porridge-like soup made from stewed chicken or lamb and coarsely ground soaked wheat) a national dish?

As you may have guessed, each of these questions is related to Asia. We've teamed up with My Wonderful World, a National Geographic-led campaign for geographic literacy, to give students, parents and geography enthusiasts a look at "Asia: Continent of Contrasts" during Geography Awareness Week. Held annually during the third week of November, Geography Awareness Week is an initiative to create awareness of the people, places and diversity of a specific world region.

Check out My Wonderful World's tours of Asia in Google Earth, featuring photos, videos and interesting tidbits about Asia -- its natural wonders, wildlife, art, cuisine and more. You can also test your knowledge with the "Ultimate Asia Challenge." Within these layers you'll find answers to the questions above and many more.



Geography Awareness Week offers a great example of how Google Earth and other online applications can be used in the classroom to make learning more interactive and visual, whether your subject matter is Asia, astronomy or algae. Each day this week, we'll be posting other examples of how mapping tools can make a difference in the classroom.

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Map of the Day: San Francisco Bay Oil Spill

Posted by James DeBoer, Software Engineer, Google Maps

Google Maps' map-making tools are often used by news agencies to report stories as they happen. This past week's oil spill in the San Francisco Bay is a good example. The San Francisco Chronicle's map provides numerous pictures of the slick and cleanup. The KCBS map also shows areas affected and roughly how far the oil has travelled.

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Transit routing up north

Posted by Joe Hughes, Software Engineer

I'm happy to announce we've added directions for Vancouver's TransLink buses, trains, and ferries to Google Maps. Now, any time you search for directions in the Lower Mainland using Google Maps, you'll see a "Take Public Transit" link above the driving directions. If you click on it, you'll see a few ways that you can get to your destination using a combination of buses, SkyTrain, SeaBus, and West Coast Express. For example, here's a route from Pacific Central Station to Lonsdale Quay:



Since Vancouver is our first Google Transit city in Canada, I made a special trip to meet with TransLink folks and local transit advocates last week. TransLink has big goals for reducing carbon emissions in the region while helping residents and visitors get around (especially during the 2010 winter Olympics), so we're happy to help them reach a broader audience through Google Maps. By sharing their schedule information with us in GTFS format, TransLink will also able to make their route information more accessible to non-English speakers and the visually impaired (Google Maps is available in many languages as well as in a plain HTML version that works with screen readers).

This is another exciting step for us, but our work is far from done. We'll keep you posted on our progress as we continue to work with more transit agencies to bring their routes to Google Maps.

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New layers in Google Earth

Posted by Wei Luo, Senior GIS Specialist

People will find some pleasant surprises in the most recent Google Earth data update. You've already heard about the new "Weather" and "MDG Monitor" layers, but that's not all ...

We have re-organized the data layers in the left-side Layers panel in this new release. The long layer list has been shrunk into a smaller set. Basic information such as roads, 3D buildings, and Weather are at the top. If you are looking for interesting things to do or places to visit, expand the "Gallery" or "Places of Interest" folders and you will find a wide selection of interesting data layers for you to explore.



If you've ever wanted to plan a trip to Egypt, you can now turn on the "Egypt Tourism" layer to see a collection of destinations to visit. You'll even find intricately designed 3D models of some of the famous landmarks.





But if you just want to stick around and hang out with friends and family this holiday season, you might be happy to know you can find good restaurants easier than ever with Google Earth. The data team has recently updated the business listing layers with user reviews. Simply zoom into the neighborhood you want to go to, and you'll see restaurants show up at street level. You can read reviews of the restaurants before you head out. Or if you have some good restaurants to recommend, you can write reviews. To see more things to do, expand the "Places of Interest" folder and check out other local business and recreation information.



We've also added Wikipedia articles in 6 languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Dutch. Other updates include adding all country names in local languages as well as business listings for Australia.

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Tracking human development in Google Earth

Posted by Megan Goddard, Senior GIS Specialist

We're happy to let you know that the MDG Monitor, which launched last week at the United Nations, is now live in Google Earth. You can find it in the 'Global Awareness' folder on the left-side panel.

The Millennium Development Goals aim to:

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

• Achieve universal primary education
  

• Promote gender equality and empower women
  

• Reduce child mortality
  

• Improve maternal health

• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

• Ensure environmental sustainability
  

• Develop a global partnership for development

Back in 2000, all of the countries of the world agreed to reach these goals by 2015. We are now halfway there, and while many countries have made excellent strides, there is still a long way to go. The MDG Monitor makes it easy to track the progress, so we encourage you to take a look at the layer and find out more about what governments around the world are doing (and sadly, in some cases, not doing) to improve the health and well-being of their citizens.

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How's the weather?

Posted by Cris Castello, GIS Data Engineer

A wise man once said, "I ain't often right, but I've never been wrong." When it comes to weather forecasts, this certainly rings true. You always remember that day when you planned a picnic because it was supposed to be sunny and it ended up raining. In the latest release of Google Earth layers, we're letting you play weatherman by publishing a slew of great, dynamic weather data.

If you're running the latest version of Google Earth, you'll notice a new "Weather" folder in the layers panel:



The "Weather" folder contains three sub-layers ("Clouds," "Radar," and "Conditions and Forecasts") and one "Information" link that gives you some background information on the data being displayed. The "Clouds" layer depicts a global satellite mosaic of clouds created on an hourly basis by our friends down the road at the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey. As some of the foremost satellite meteorologists in the world, they have implemented various algorithms to make the data as accurate and comprehensive as possible. Click on the "Information" link in the "Weather" folder to see the what time the current clouds image portrays. Please note that there are a couple of hours of latency built into the data. In other words, the image you're looking at is probably from two to three hours ago. For a special visual treat, try zooming in towards the clouds. You'll eventually find yourself below the clouds, at which point you can look up and see the cloud deck above you.

The "Radar" layer contains a near real-time Doppler radar image of the United States, updated every 15 minutes. This data is being fed to us by the folks at Weather.com. We will shortly be rolling out radar for Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawaii, and Europe as well. The "Information" bubble contains the time stamp associated with the current radar image.

Weather.com is also providing us with observation and forecast data for nearly 50,000 cities worldwide; that's what you see in the "Conditions and Forecasts" layer. You can zoom around to see the current conditions and forecasts for just about every major city in the world, among other cities. Can you find the world's most extreme weather? What about Base Orcadas in the South Orkney Islands, where, as I'm writing this, it's 23 degrees F with a 26 mph wind, making it feel like 6 degrees? And it's just about summertime there! The current conditions are updated at least hourly (more often in some places), and the forecasts get updated once every few hours.

My favorite feature of this release is something that you won't see in the layers panel of Google Earth itself. We're offering a separate KML network link download of a time animation of the last 24 hours of clouds data or the last 6 hours of radar data. Once you download the file, you'll see a new item in your "Temporary Places" folder in the "Places" panel (either "Clouds Animation" or "Radar Animation," depending on which file you downloaded). Make the animation visible by checking its associated checkbox, then click the "Play" button in the animation control at the top right of your screen and wait for the data to load (even though the resolution isn't as high as the static image, it might take a little while). If you load the clouds animation (be sure to turn off the current clouds image), you'll be rewarded with a beautiful animation of clouds dancing and swirling across the Earth's surface. More than any other data I've seen, the cloud animation turns Google Earth from an artificial virtual globe into a living and pulsing representation of the planet.

We're really excited to share all this great new data with you and have plans to add more down the road. I mentioned adding radar for places outside of the U.S., and we'll also be fully internationalizing the point conditions layer. Enjoy the weather!

Update: Due to high traffic, it may be difficult to access the layer right now. Rest assured that we are working on it, and please check back soon!

Update: All Weather layers should be fully visible now. We're sorry for any difficulties you may have had accessing them earlier. It's nothing but blue skies from here!

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Google on the go

Posted by Karen Roter Davis, Principal, Business Development

In my formative years, I spent countless hours in the backseat of my parents' car listening to them argue about whether or not they should pull over to ask for directions. I love my parents dearly, but I still can't comprehend how we wound up going north on I-95 driving from New York to Florida!

So I was especially excited to work with Gilbarco Veeder-Root to make driving directions and local business information available to people at the gas pump. Access to local information is so vital to our users, and it's especially relevant when they're not at home or at their desks. In the same way that we worked with Jet Blue and Virgin America to provide Google Maps on their flights, we want to make sure people can access the power of Google search whenever and wherever they need it.

And if we can improve a family vacation or two along the way, so much the better!

For more information, check out Gilbarco's press release.

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