Facilitating tropical cyclone analysis of hurricane satellite (HURSAT) imagery with Google Earth

Tropical cyclone satellite imagery can be used for various applications. Some examples include reanalyzing storm intensity, improving forecast techniques, and training analysts. The Hurricane Satellite (HURSAT) dataset was used to create more than one million satellite images for worldwide tropical cyclones. The imagery derive from infrared, visible and microwave data. Imagery were created using similar color scales as the widely used Navy Research Laboratory (NRL) satellite tropical imagery. Google Earth facilitates the browsing and comparison of all these imagery. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) now hosts all imagery online and serves them via Google Earth, which is a freely available data display system. The Keyhole Markup Language (KML) file design allows for simple access to millions of images for more than two thousand tropical cyclones in just a few clicks.