Google Earth Community: Live Tropical Data & NHC Forecast Models

Yessir, maybe even up to New York Area...occasionally get an Atlantic storm up that way. The problem with the NSSL CONUS link (Like the one Frank attached below, which I'll reply to in a second) is that it's too much, and it's too big. I think for our purposes we want to focus in (and use resources) on what we are interested in only. I like the idea of using the Ridge Radars (NWS Nexrad)...BUT.

I toyed with the idea of adding the Ridge Radars myself when pdchawaii gave the Rita Radar coverage, but I found a couple of problems that I didn't particularly like about it so I didn't put forth the effort and jsut used what he provided. These may be nit-picks, but I've tried to keep this link as nice as possible and maybe I'm just being unrealistic. First, I noticed that at some points in time certain sites (Corpus Christi for example) weren't consistent with the other sites. For instance, CC's ground clutter had a totally different return signal strength for ground clutter than the rest. This made CC red while everything else was blue (50db vs 5db return strength via the scale provided). I'm not sure this is a common occurance, but it was annoying nonetheless. Along the same lines, the ground clutter from these sites is excessive isn't it? Now for me, and probably a lot of you that understand radar this isn't a problem, but for the layperson that is looking at the overlay and doesn't understand how radar works I can imagine them thinking that it's wrong, or broken, or just stupid. I mean if a normal user that expects to turn on the radar layer and expects to see only weather, turns it on and the coast lights up like a Christmas tree.....they may get turned off and/or confused by it. This is one area where the NSSL and other radar images that are somewhat post-processed are better. Again, maybe being too picky, but just trying to convey the point. This also may be the best we can do, and that's fine also......I guess I just don't know for sure and so would raise the question.

First off, that's awesome. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Secondly, I'm not setting standards here per se, but like you would like to provide the most amount of information that is useful AND, to be blunt, not just trash to say that it's in there. I basically don't want to just shoehorn stuff in there just because we can....you know what I mean. I'd also like to make this as much of a community effort as possible.....I may have started this but am not stupid enough to think that someone can't do something better or provide something different that would be of use. Next storm season this could be 1000x better than I made it this year, and I hope it is. The only reason I've kept a little bit of control over what has been in it so far is because #1 my name has been on it so far, and #2 I've had to limit it to what my resources can handle as far as time, ability, and bandwidth are concerned.

Also, from a technical standpoint, this is mostly implemented on top of the .NET framework in C#...only because I'm good at it, and it's super easy to rapidly develop in it. I used a fairly quick and dirty approach to the code because I basically started this while storm season was in full swing. I need to spend an entire weekend going back and cleaning up the code before I let anyone see it. Kinda like cleaning up the house before company arrives lol.

Hopefully as the GE Client API evolves, and more data becomes available from people who see the benefit of making it geo-friendly, we can shine this link up to something much better than it is now.

Paully

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