My Google Map Blog

Google has just released the June issue of the Sightseer newsletter, with all of kinds of great information inside. If you don't get this great newsletter emailed to you every month, we'll give you a quick peek at what you'll find inside. If you'd like, you can sign up here to receive it each month.

While you've likely already read many of the stories they feature, here's a look at some of what's included:

• Google Earth 5.2
• Google Earth for iPad
• World Cup stadiums in 3D
• World Oceans Day
• The June 15 Imagery Update

Along with the feature stories, they also cover some unique Google Earth content that has been produced in the last month. Some are from our blog, but others (like the excellent "History of Islamic Architecture") can be found elsewhere.

Finally, they have their challenging "Where in the World?" challenge. They post an image of a location and you need to figure out where it is. I call it "challenging" because I can never find them. :) However, I'm always amazed by some of the people that can find these locations so quickly. Here is the image for this month:

If you're able to find it, congrats! Just don't spoil it for anyone else. If you enjoy that kind of challenge, check out Place Spotting, which has a series of images of similar difficulty.

With Hurricane Alex making landfall, the 2010 Hurricane season is underway. As we've shared in the past, Google Earth can be a great way to track these hurricanes as they develop.

The first place to start is the weather and storm tracking tools collection which Frank assembled a few years ago. It's got a variety of layers that helps to view all of the current storms out there. You can read more about how he put this package together.

Another good resource is hurricane-tracking.co.uk's download page. Their files are quite useful, but they generate a new one for each storm. It'd be nice to see them wrap all of the files into a network link so that it'd update automatically, but it's still a useful tool to have.

Last year Google created a special layer for "Hurricane Season 2009" in the main "Weather" layer folder. They haven't created a 2010 version, but I hope they will because the 2009 version was quite useful. In the meantime, the "clouds" and "radar" information in there is still helpful, but doesn't do a lot in terms of storm tracking.

Do you know of other useful tools for tracking hurricanes/cyclones in Google Earth? Let us know in the comments section so others can use them as well.

The man with a horse mask is back…

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