Hurricane hunters are the “eyes in the sky” for those studying and forecasting hurricanes. The folks over at the Google Earth Blog describe how you can follow live hurricane recon missions, or see the results from recent missions using Google Earth. Check it out.

For more information about hurricane hunters see:

• The Hurricane Hunters
• NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters Aircraft

The Physical Environment Textbook links: Hurricanes

Hurricane Hunters
Courtesy Discovery News

Description provided by the site: “Compare historical images to learn about deforestation of the Amazon.
Use images from the past 30 years to compare the difference in forest coverage in the Amazon forest of Brazil, courtesy of the United Nation Environment Programme’s Atlas of Our Changing Environment layer in the “Global Awareness” folder in the “Layers” Panel in Google Earth.”

SUNY-ESF and renowned hydrologist Peter Black present a 5-set series of 90-second podcasts covering all aspects of water, “Science/Hydrology”, “Government, Law, & Organizations”, “Culture/History”, and “Management/Policy”. Podcasts are available at iTunesU. Titles include:

• Introduction to Water Drops
• Municipal Water Supplies
• Pricing Water
• Water in Culture
• Water in the World
• Corps of Engineers
• NOAA
• Agricultural Drought
• Chance of Flood
• Runoff

iTunes for OS X or Windows required. Get it here.

The Physical Environment textbook links: “The Hydrosphere”

View recent tornado reports, current radar, photos and historically significant storms using Google Maps with Weather Underground’s Interactive Tornado Map. A great example of Web 2.0 technology in action.

Weather Underground’s Tornado FAQ is a very useful resource as well.

The Physical Environment textbook link: Tornadoes

The Earth Online Media Blog is a companion to this site. It is dedicated to multimedia presentations related to topics discussed on the blog. Check out Earth Online Media.

NetVibes is one of many personal web page sites, much like iGoogle. “Netvibes lets individuals assemble their favorite widgets, websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and everything else they enjoy on the web - all in one place. “ A Netvibes “universe” is a special shared page created by an organization like the USGS or Greenpeace, or maybe a newspaper. Widgets in the USGS universe keep you up-to-date with the latest USGS news, recent earthquakes, volcano activity reports, map search, YouTube videos, and much more. You can add their widgets to your personalized NetVibe site too. You can also create a public page to share your digital digs.

The World Wide Web has become an exciting platform to share geoscience information with professional colleagues and the public.  In this Google Tech Talk from December 18, 2007 John E. Bailey, Alaska Volcano Observatory & Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks discuss his use of Google Earth to study volcanoes. Description from the site:

“Volcanoes are some of the most dynamic and visually spectacular natural features on the Earth’s surface. In Alaska, volcanoes are an intrinsic part of the landscape and culture, with over 70 volcanoes and volcanic fields that have been active in historic time. Monitoring of these volcanoes is undertaken by the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) using a suite of methods and tools in the fields of remote sensing, seismology, geodesy and geology that produce large volumes of geospatial data. The evolution in the capabilities of Google Earth and KML has provided a user-friendly interface and information-rich context in which these data can be displayed simultaneously and dynamically, offering new possibilities for communications with other scientists, emergency managers and the general public. I will present an overview of AVO’s operations, and demonstrate our, and the wider volcanological community’s use of Google Earth. “

Other Google Tech Talks are here.

The Google Earth Gallery links you to a number geoscience-related Google Earth layers. For instance, the Global Paleogeographic Views layer lets you view the changing configuration of the earth’s surface from the Late Precambrian to the present.

Public-interest groups and individuals are using Google Earth to bring a valuable geographic context to important issues. Check out the Google Earth Outreach Showcase for issues concerning climate change, disappearing forests, land use assessment and more.

Keep up-to-date with new cool Google Earth layers by reading the Google Earth Blog.

Google’s Geo Education home provides access to Google’s premier programs such as Google Earth and Sketchup. The Geo Education home also provides ideas as to how to use these tools in the classroom. For instance, The Smithsonian Institute’s Global Volcanism Program has created a Google Earth Holocene Volcanoes placemark file that displays a photo, geographic data, and links to more detailed information from the GVP, international volcano observatories and websites.

Check out Google Geo Education Home

A few years ago, Google began creating a suite of office productivity apps that include a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software. These are online applications that store your files on Google servers and are accessible through a web browser from any computer connected to the Internet. Though nowhere close to having all the bells and whistles of Microsnot’s Office suite, it provides plenty of functionality to create basic documents. You can save (download) documents to your local computer in a variety of formats, e.g. WORD, OpenOffice, pdf, html, rtf to edit in other programs if you desire. Files can also be setup for sharing and collaborative editing by colleagues. Starting this week (and extending over several weeks), Google is rolling out it’s Google Gears implementation of Google docs that will allow offline editing if you’re not connected to the Internet.

As one who works from a variety of different places, I’ve found it very handy. I don’t need the bloatware that WORD has become for most of my needs, especially for note taking (Google Notebook is also good for this) and initial drafts.

If you haven’t checked it out already, see http://docs.google.com/

The suite has gained such popularity that Microsnot has developed a similar product, Office Live Workspace.

Oh, Google’s office suite is free too.

See Earth Online Media post “Google Docs Offline”

For more Google applications see: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/