Finally some really nice Virtual Earth goodness now with the 6.2 release of the Virtual Earth Control.  While the mobile support looks nice… it is something I don’t have a use or need for.  But, a lot of the other features are quite nice:

New landmark hints in routing. Customers in the U.S. and Canada can now use maps that feature familiar landmarks, such as gas stations and fast-food restaurants, called out by name.

That makes so much more sense when reading directions and is something people have used for a very long time when giving directions.

New imagery metadata. Users can now find out the relative age of a given image, which will help them assess if the imagery is still relevant to their needs.

Will be interesting to see how this differs from Google’s approach (you can view a location and still not be sure what data source and date you are looking at).

New imagery. Find locations that come to life, with richer bird’s eye and 3D imagery of more locations in cities across North America.

Always a plus to see (also means more new imagery in WorldWind… just need to get the bird’s eye working now)

Weather integration. Bring your 3D maps to life by featuring near real-time local weather and cloud formations.

This is something I want to try out.. but I am also wondering what this will do to the computer resources as well.  It does not look like it uses imagery, it just goes by what the forecast for the region says.. if it is reported at being cloudy then generic clouds would be rendered.  But still it looks like a nice eye candy feature.

These are just some of the features that I think look the most interesting.  To see the full list check the MSDN post out.

You can try out the SDK and read more on the Virtual Earth Dev site and try out the SDK here.

While Frank points out that “Google and NOAA” have released an imagery layer for Hurricane Ike after-Imagery.  I thought it would be good to point out that you are NOT limited to Google for this imagery.

You can get the imagery right from NOAA, if you know where to look (It is actually the National Geodetic Survey that is doing the imagery).  Here is the Ike imagery page and also the Gustav imagery page.  You can download the individual images or whole paths of the fly-over imagery.

And if you don’t feel like downloading the imagery and doing the processing yourself, You can view it online as well as in NASA WorldWind with the ZoomIt! layer.

One thing I noticed though while looking at the imagery… the GE imagery.. well, it seems sub-par in quality.  Not to mention it is different imagery that what I have seen from the NGS.  Example:

As you can see these two images are of the same location and about the same altitude.  But they are different times of the day (if not different days) as you can tell from the foam on the water.  But if you look closer you see the “Public Imagery” on the right has a better processing and is much cleaner and sharper in the fine details.

Hanna has hit land and is moving up the East Coast now.  The good thing is that this storm is bringing some much needed rain to this area.  Hopefully we can get a good 18+ hours of rain today.

The “Hurricane Gustav Hydrologic Impacts Map” shows the location of streamgages where the water level is currently at or above flood stage (depicted as a black triangle) or at a historical high discharge (depicted as blue circles); other USGS streamgages are depicted as open circles. The map also shows the location of storm surge sensors (red squares) which monitor water levels in rivers and canals.

The map is in near-real time, meaning each time you refresh any changes will appear.

IAGT (The Institute for the Applications of Geospatial Technology) has released a new plug-in for SERVIR Viz (a variation of WorldWind.net). Climate Mapper was developed for SERVIR Viz to give access to historical weather data as well as projections of climate change. Currently, the data is centered on Africa, but a global dataset is forthcoming.

You can download the plug-in here, it is a large download (108MB), that is because it includes the database of the data for offline viewing of the data. This plug-in is for SERVIR Viz, after talking to the developer there is now a WorldWind version but it needs approval for it to be released.

Edit: The WorldWind plug-in has been released.

When you download Climate Mapper and install it, you can access it from the task bar.

You will then get a new window where you can select a theme; Temperature, Precipitation, Soil Moisture, etc.. select if you want observed (historical) data or modeled data (future) and the date range to view.

You can then map the data to the WorldWind globe. This view shows the precipitation in Africa from 1961 to 1990.

You can also chart the data from a certain point by clicking the “Graph by X,Y Location” button and then clicking on the WorldWind globe. You will then get a graph of the data for that location which you can export for use outside of WorldWind.

m_k has some screen shots up of looking at the fires in Greece using the MODIS Historical Plug-In for World Wind. Between using the MODIS Plug-in and the ESA Fire Plug-In, you can watch the fires grow in size from their beginnings a few weeks ago.