Thursday, September 27, 2007

More Google stuff


Still playing with projections and images...
Google Earth and Google Maps can superimpose images on the charts. The problem is that they recalculate the coordinates of the document - an image - based on an Anaximandre (square) projection. The NOAA faxes are available as Mercator projection; so I had this interesting Java exercise to turn an image representing a Mercator projection into an image representing the same data, but using an Anaximandre one. Interesting, indeed. The same operation is probably available for the other projections, we'll see that later.
The Google Earth one is pretty interesting, as you can use it in conjunction with other overlays, like clouds, winds, etc, from different origins. It's quite snappy.

If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, download this kmz file, and try for yourself, it's for the North Pacific. And if you don't have it, you should get it, it's free.
The cloud layer in the picture above can be reached through http://www.barnabu.co.uk/live-global-clouds-for-google-earth.

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