Temperature, wind speed, and precipitation: Explore weather data in Google Earth

By Cris Castello, GIS Data Engineer, Google Earth

Here on the Google Earth team, we’ve always thought that using Earth as a basemap for displaying weather data was a perfect fit. The trick has always been getting timely data and making it useful. So I’m particularly excited to share that starting today in Google Earth, you can get near real-time data for temperature, wind speed, and precipitation — all courtesy of The Weather Company, an IBM Business.

The Weather Company creates Mercator-based image tiles for many data layers, which get recreated every few minutes (depending on the dataset). For a while now, users of weather.com have had the ability to add these data layers to their maps, and we’ve now brought these same layers over to Google Earth for Chrome, Android and iOS. You’ll find them in the new Layers category in Voyager, Earth’s home for stories and curated map collections. Here we’ll be adding new datasets that you can turn on and off, and explore on the globe.