Grads & Google Earth

[Geert Jan van Oldenborgh]

I have been thinking about viewing grads output in Google Earth to impress the funding agency :-).

The easy route, which I have implemented on the Climate Explorer, seems to be to printim a PNG at rather high resolution (0.25 degrees) and import that into Google Earth as a <GroundOverlay>.  Properly defining the corner points took some work, but I do get suitably impressive rotating spheres with useful information on it.  For the colour bar I use a <ScreenOverlay>; the numbers get a bit thin but otherwise it works.  For a demo see http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/g32440_1.kml

A much better alternative would be to generate a KML file with <Polygon>s correponding to the shaded areas or grid boxes.  Unfortunately, by the time these are in the metafile the coordinate information is lost, so the easiest place to generate them would be in grads itself, instead of the grads metafile format.  Is anybody already working on that?

Greetings from sunny but finally cold Holland,

        Geert Jan avn Oldenborgh

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Geert Jan van Oldenborgh
ENSO & seasonal forecasting, Oceanography, Climate Research
Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI)
oldenborgh at knmi.nl          http://www.knmi.nl/~oldenbor