Nautical Info from Google Maps
I just ran across a great Google Maps mashup for any sort of marine enthusiast. Someone has thrown together a site where you can view tide data, sunrise/sunsets, weather, and satellite imagery all on the same page for any location you ask for. You pass it a city, zip code, or latitude and longitude (DMS or decimal degrees) and it spits out a map with all the relevant tide data from local NOAA or USCG stations. Really neat for that fisherman inside all of us.
Marine Charts for Google Earth
A company called EarthNC is now providing a CD with 600 NOAA ENC charts and 70 Army Corps of Engineers Inland charts. NOAA’s nautical chart data is provided for free electronically and EarthNC has translated it into an intelligent KML format to be used as a Google Earth overlay. The screenshots look pretty interesting:
Depth Soundings
Vector Data and Intelligent Zooming
Google Earth has really become a powerful tool, even for marine use. With a small laptop or portable computer and a cheap GPS (and an EVDO card if you’re feeling saucy), fisherman, sailors, and recreational boaters can create an advanced data storage and tracking system for themselves. One could store anything from good fishing spots to sailing routes to nice island campsites. And with something like EarthNC’s product, your nautical charts could be obsolete (and we all hate handling unwieldy and sometimes non-waterproof charts on a trip, especially in the rain). I hope that Google, DigitalGlobe, TerraXplorer and other imagery vendors get more into the marine imaging arena. There’s some crude bathymetry data on Google Earth, but for inland imaging, they could do better. This is a very compelling product. It’s nice to see folks really adopting the KML format and doing amazing things with it.