My Google Map Blog

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.

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)