My Google Map Blog

As a number of GEB readers have noted, some of Google Earth’s weather layers have not been working correctly and as of this writing the data is out of date. The ‘Conditions and Forecasts’ layer has not been updated since May 28th, 2015. The ‘Oceans Observations’ layer has even older data, mostly from 2013. The ‘Clouds’ and ‘Radar’ layers are up to date – see the ‘Information’ layer for exact date and time for each and for animated versions of both layers.

We believe Google is aware of the problem with the ‘Conditions and Forecasts’ layer and is working to resolve it. Because weather information is really only useful when it is current, Google should consider modifying the layer to either give a clear warning message when weather information is out of date, or to replace the old data altogether with a ‘data unavailable’ message.

It is, of course, possible to get weather information from many other sources including weather.com the source Google Earth uses. We have not been able to find any site that gives similar weather information in KML format, but there are a number of different weather resources that are available in that format. A while back Frank made a collection of weather resources and it was updated by Mickey. We have also found that NOAA and NASA provide a variety of weather datasets as KMLs, although they are mostly focused on North America.

Sea surface temperatures from NASA.

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