NASA's World Wind

Resource Management revision... fisheries management... fish hatching and larval development... phytoplankton bloom...

Which reminded me of this neat little piece of software that NASA offers for free. It's a fully interactive earth explorer, combining satellite shots stored on a NASA server (updated daily) with sophisticated 3D imaging and the power of the internet.

Besides allowing you to zoom up to city level of any place in the world (while feeding you other info ie. latitude and longitude, altitude, distances etc.), to view aerial-like shots, landmarks, the geographical terrain, or the weather, it also allows you to search up recent and historial climate and environmental events and flashes a satellite image of the occurrence onto the grids.

This turns out events like global wildfires and volcanic activity or tsunamis. I thought I had also saw 'phytoplankton blooms' before, so I tried looking one up. Sure enough, one such bloom was caught on satellite yesterday, to the south of Ireland. I was wondering... if this correlates with the recent increase in temperatures around the region. Interesting. I hope some fisheries question comes out tomorrow and I can mention this. :P

Also, just for fun, I hovered over South Kensington in London and took a screenshot (did some labelling too, for the unenlightened). And the last shot's to cheer to Fort William and Ben Nevis, their mention in our answers, and the scaling of Britain's highest mountain (just 1344m!) which never happened.






Before you download the program however, do note that it requires a "fairly modern and powerful PC and works best with a broadband connection" and quite a bit of diskspace. 'Else you might end up getting gritty unintelligible graphics.

posted by Husky @ 6/20/2005 11:10:00 PM  |