Extended Abstract (404K)9B.3
Dynamically Updated Environmental Satellite Data in Google Earth: An Application to Tropical Meteorology
F. Joseph Turk, NRL, Monterey, CA; and S. Miller, J. Hawkins, and K. Richardson
The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has maintained a World Wide Web-based tropical cyclone website with a diverse selection of realtime geostationary and low Earth orbiting satellite imagery for active tropical storms, including as an extensive image archive going back to 1997. To facilitate the display, animation and layering of colocated satellite with other observational datasets in a user-selective fashion, the realtime satellite data processing stream was adapted for use within Google Earth. Google Earth has features which are desirable for dissemination of a wide range of environmental satellite data types. Since these satellite data are available with a variety of horizontal spatial resolutions (e.g. 4-km infrared imagery on geostationary imagers to 250-meter visible imagery from the MODIS instruments on EOS-Aqua and Terra), the imagery is tiled at a very small size. This allows low-bandwidth users to efficiently view and animate a sequence of imagery while zoomed out from the surface, whereas high-bandwidth users can take full advantage of the native resolution of the imagery while zoomed in, which automatically triggers downloads of higher resolution tiles. Dynamically updated network links for both the tropical storm basin (Atlantic, Eastern Pacific, etc) and all storms within each basin provide automatic updates to track positions and receipt of new satellite imagery and derived image products. These dynamically updated data layers allow for immediate overlay and fusion with other Earth layer data (e.g, reconnaissance flight tracks, forecasted hurricane track, wind vectors, contour lines), and remote interaction with a variety of users in government, private and educational sectors. A demonstration from the 2007 hurricane season will be presented.
Session 9B, Virtual Globe
Thursday, 24 January 2008, 1:30 PM-3:00 PM, 207
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