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.
Dubai Waterfront
The other day, I saw a whole documentary about the Dubai Waterfront project, currently underway in the United Arab Emirates. The construction itself is absolutely amazing, consisting of 3 massive “Palm Islands” (like the one pictured, Google Earth .kmz placemark) that will be home to 400,000 new residents. Construction is being undertaken by a company called Al Nakheel, in conjunction with hundreds of architects, engineers, designers, and developers from all over the world. As yet, the completion date is undetermined, (understandably so, considering the ludicrous amount of work to involved in even creating the land for all this property). This whole thing reminds me of Venice, Italy times about 1 million.
At the center of the whole final development will be Al Burj, which will be one of the tallest buildings in the world (built on a few feet of sand, mind you). All I can say is, I definitely have a reason to become filthy rich now.
