My Google Map Blog

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Google Earth has a variety of built-in layers that give you some amazing ways to view the current weather around the world. Simply by turning on the [Clouds] and [Radar] layers inside of the main [Weather] layer, you can get a great look at clouds and precipitation around the world.

If you dive below the clouds you'll find a few nice touches. First, the clouds/radar are not on the surface of the earth, but up an an elevation of approximately 35 miles. Also, if you fly under an area that is currently raining or snowing (and you have an adequate video card) you'l actually see animated rain/snow on your screen.

You can also use the weather layer to help track hurricanes, as we showed you a few months ago with Hurricane Isaac.

Finally, for those that wish to dig a little deeper, we have our popular collection of weather tools that give you a variety of other weather-related data to explore.

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Google has been updating and expanding their Street View imagery quite a bit over the past year, but today's update is their single largest in history with more than 250,000 miles of new and updated imagery! In addition, they've doubled the number of special collections that they have available, making Street View even more valuable than it already was.

They've increased coverage in Macau, Singapore, Sweden, the U.S., Thailand, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway and Canada and launched special collections in South Africa, Japan, Spain, France, Brazil, Mexico and others.

Some noteable areas to check out with the new imagery include Catherine Palace in Russia, Stanley Park in Vancouver (seen above) and Fort Canning Park in Singapore.

Head over to maps.google.com/streetview to learn more, or watch the short video below for some tips on using Street View inside of Google Earth:

(via Google Lat Long Blog)

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Back in March we told you about the amazing story of Saroo Brierley, the Indian man who became separated from his family at age five and found them 25 years later using Google Earth. Details were fairly light at that time, but this month's Vanity Fair has the full story -- and it's amazing!

Saroo used Facebook and MySpace to contact four Indian friends he knew from college. He asked them to ask their parents how fast trains traveled in India in the 1980s. Saroo took the average speed--80 kilometers per hour--and, crunching the numbers, determined that he must have boarded the train roughly 960 kilometers from Calcutta.

With the satellite image of India on his screen, he opened an editing program and began slowly drawing a circle with a radius of roughly 960 kilometers, with Calcutta at its center, creating a perimeter within which to search. Then he realized he could narrow it down even further, eliminating the regions that didn't speak Hindi and those with cold climates.

He flew over trees and rooftops, buildings and fields, until he came to the next depot, and his eyes fell on a river beside it--a river that flowed over a dam like a waterfall.

Saroo moved his cursor over the streets on-screen: a left here, a right there, until he arrived at the heart of the town--and the satellite image of a fountain, the same fountain where he had scarred his leg climbing over the fence 25 years before.

Check out the full story on Vanity Fair, and watch this short video to see exactly how Saroo used Google Earth to find his home.

To explore the city of Khandwa for yourself, as seen in the video, you can use this KML file to get started.

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