You can now enable near-real time radar and cloud images, as well as forecasts from within the 3D mapping component of GPS Insight. Here is a screenshot:
One of the nicest things about the way Google has implemented this within Google Earth is they’ve put the images 19 miles up in the sky, as opposed to on the ground like some other 3rd party weather providers have don in the past. When you’re zoomed down, you can see your vehicles and your landmarks, the roads, etc, as opposed to a big white cloud parked on the ground.
I’m no meteorologist, but I believe 19 miles is artificially high — I travel a lot and it seems to me we don’t go that high before hitting cloudsq. In fact, I’ve fallen through some pretty painful clouds (rain at 2 miles high is frequently big chunks of ice and terminal velocity of a skydiver is 110 mph — ouch) in my 6 year long skydiving career and the highest we typically got out of the plane was 3 miles above earth (15,000 feet or so). [I don't skydive any longer -- kids make you rethink the risk/benefits of that activity...]
That small inaccuracy aside, I’m glad Google put them so high. Here’s why:
This is the United States and a large number of vehicles we track, under cloud cover. We can’t see much below the cloud-covered areas.
Zooming down, we head toward Phoenix, where we are headquartered (Scottsdale) and we still can’t see under the clouds/radar:
Since Scottsdale is typically pretty rain-free, I head toward the closest area under cloud/radar cover, near the border in Yuma, where we have customer who tracks their produce trucks:
Once I break through 25 and 19 miles (radar and clouds respectively) I can see clearly again, and I measure the width and it’s 21.32 miles wide — enough for most typical customers to see their trucks without clouds getting in the way. I’ve put a red box around where you turn weather on & off:
Zooming down again to a similar 19 mile high view of Phoenix we see that there are a LOT of trucks we can see within GPS Insight at that level.
This is obviously a bigger concern for people in Seattle than people in Phoenix, given the frequency of cloud cover. In any case, it’s nice to have weather data available, and also be able to turn it on/off with a single click in case it gets in the way. It’s also nice to live in Scottsdale this time of year. 64 degrees here at 11:30 at night, & 79 tomorrow. Too bad I’m flying through some clouds tomorrow afternoon to a place much colder.
Rob.