I have got output from Weather Research Forecasting Software(WRF) in NETCDF format. These are basically high resolution forecasts for precipitation and wind barbs(sea breeze circulations or slope valley circulations). I want to be able to display this on Google Earth or some similar GIS software. It should be interactive meaning I should be click to the highest possible resolution to tell the viewer in which neighborhood the rainfall occurred. It should also show the terrain etc if in mountainous area. The tools on this web page – http://www.nusculus.com/wtools allows me to see static geographical domain information on Google Earth by converting WRF output(in NETCDF format) into KML format. I want to be able to project meteorological data onto Google Earth. Does anyone know of any tool(could be in any language-java,python) out there that does this ?
[GIS] Superimposing high resolution NetCDF data on Google Earth
datageoprocessinggoogle earthnetcdf
Related Solutions
It is not possible to download Google imagery; that would be a violation of the terms of service. You can, however, under/overlay the imagery via a Google Earth Pro account with your own data in Google Earth Enterprise.
Google Earth Portable allows you to "cut out" an area of your globe from Google Earth Enterprise. Portable literally takes all the data & imagery from all the layers that is within the boundaries of your specified polygon and creates a new Portable globe that can be hosted on a flash drive or laptop. No internet connection required.
We have built them for post-hurricane response in the South. Portable was built for use in disaster areas and is being used in Japan right now.
navagis.com
The resolution of imagery in Google Earth varies depending on the source of the data. When you zoom out, you will see the nice, pretty global coverage produced from a mosaic of many Landsat scenes, which have a native resolution of ~30m (~15m pan-sharpened).
Zooming in, you'll start to get high-resolution in most places. There are many rural areas especially in Africa, where broad coverage is provided by the SPOT satellites, which produce anywhere from 10m to 1.5m resolution. Next you can still find some Ikonos data in a few places, at about 1m resolution. Then you get down to the really high-resolution satellites, including Digital Globe's WorldView-1/2/3 series, GeoEye-1, and Airbus' Pleiades, all of which provide data at around 0.5m resolution. That's about the limit for satellite data, though a few places are staring to get data from newer satellites (including WorldView-3) at around 0.3m.
In much of North America, Europe, Japan and some other places, you'll find even higher resolution images which generally come from aerial systems (cameras on airplanes), and a lot of that data in Google Earth is at about 0.15m resolution. Finally, there are just a few tiny spots around the world where Google Earth shows data collected by citizen scientists (through the Public Lab), using cameras on kites and balloons, which can get down into the few centimeters per pixel range.
There is no tool that will tell you the resolution of Google Earth's imagery in any specific location. Here are some fun rules of thumb I use to quickly estimate the resolution of what I'm looking at, by zooming in on cars. If roads and house roofs look like they are 2-5 pixels wide, then you are probably seeing SPOT's 5m or 2.5m products. If you can clearly make out the shapes of cars, but their windshields are poorly defined, then it might be 1m from Ikonos. If the windshield is pretty clear, but you can only barely (or not quite) make out the frame pillars along the sides of the windshield, then you're probably looking at 0.5m satellite imagery. If you can clearly make out the pillars, and start to see the side-view mirrors on the car, then you're most likely looking at aerial data in the 0.15m range. More generally, find an object that you know the approximate size of, and see about how many pixels it's covered by, and do the math.
There is a good suggestion in previous answers, that you zoom way in and look at the copyright strings, as that will often tell you at least what company the data came from (as well as the acquisition date listed in the status bar)... though for the aerial data that may not help as a copyright is often not listed. If it's from DigitalGlobe, then it's most often 0.5m. If you really want to dig in, you can go to the company's online imagery catalog, look in your desired location, search for images around the date provided, and try to find an image that looks the same (similar colors, cloud patterns, etc.). If you can find the corresponding image in the catalog, then you can see all the metadata, including which satellite and what resolution.
For the person who posted the bounty, yes, the resolution keeps improving in most places. If you have a specific place you're interested in, post the latitude & longitude, and maybe we can help you figure it out.
Best Answer
You can try ncWMS (http://www.resc.rdg.ac.uk/trac/ncWMS/). This project aims to publish netCDF data as WMS services.
Meteorological data on web mapping is always a challenging task due to size and frequency of data available. Solutions will probably involve a mix of server size (http://www.geo-solutions.it/blog/developers-corner-supporting-wind-barbs-geoserver-geotools/) and client side (http://www.asrc.ro/imeteosat_beta/geostationary_view.php) approaches.
Best luck