Crunching massive, geographical data visualizations used to require expensive mapping software and powerful computers. Now, Google Earth is becoming the go-to application for scientists who need a cheap way to animate huge sets of 3-D data right on their home desktop. These five projects show how a simple tool can reveal hidden patterns in everything from ash to emotions.

The Volcano Tracker

On December 15, 1989, the 231 passengers aboard KLM Flight 867 were cruising at 28,000 feet over Alaska when a strange sulfur smell filled the cabin. Suddenly all four engines quit, and the Boeing 747 started to plummet. The pilots had skirted the edge of an ash plume billowing from Redoubt volcano, about 150 miles away. The ash, mostly made of tiny particles of rocks and glass, was almost invisible. “It melted and resolidified inside the engines, and they stalled,” says Peter Webley, a researcher at the University of Alaska’s Volcano Observatory. Flight 867 and its horrified passengers fell more than two miles—13,300 feet—before the pilots managed to restart the engines and land in Anchorage.

To prevent another near-crash, scientists at the university began the Puff Prediction project in 1989 to help air-traffic controllers divert planes away from dangerous plumes. Starting with wind data from the National Weather Service for all altitudes between the Earth’s surface and 52,000 feet, scientists “release a set of virtual ash particles into the model over a volcano and track where those particles go,” Webley says. In 2006, he began to use Google Earth to create three-dimensional animations that show where and when the ash cloud will be at any given time. The puff predictor updates forecasts every six hours for each of a dozen potentially erupting volcanoes in the North Pacific.

National Weather Service forecasters at the Volcanic Ash Advisory Center monitor the puff predictions in Google Earth and alert air-traffic controllers, who create no-fly zones around potentially dangerous plumes. Stalled engines aren’t the sole concern. “It’s like driving behind a truck that’s kicking up stones on the highway,” Webley says, “only you’re traveling at hundreds of miles per hour with little particles smashing into you.” Word has spread, and he regularly gets requests for puff predictions from Australia, Ecuador, Mexico, Italy, Russia—just about anywhere with a volcano and a flight path.

See a directory of current 3-D puff projections for Google Earth here.

The Storm Trooper

Hurricane hunters plot a course with real-time satellite data
The nasa jetliner took off with eight crew members and 38 scientists on a mission to study how hurricanes form. Its target was the tropical depression swirling over the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Verde, Africa, that would soon strengthen into Hurricane Helene. Pilots planned to fly a figure eight through the nascent storm while scientists inside the McDonnell Douglas DC-8 sampled atmospheric conditions with an array of onboard sensors. An hour after takeoff, a scientist tracking the flight radioed with an urgent message: Veer left to avoid a barrage of lightning dead ahead.

Side Step: Here and above, from different angles: As scientists flew into the growing storm, ground crews monitored real-time satellite images overlaid with the planned route [green] and actual track [red] of the DC-8. When lightning [yellow crosses] appeared in the plane’s path, the crews directed a move to the left to avoid danger. Photo by NASA/Tele Atlas/Terrametrics/Europa Technologies/Google Earth

That data came from the Real Time Mission Monitor (RTMM), a tool that uses Google Earth to combine up-to-the-minute weather imagery with live aircraft flight data. “We were able to see that the lightning intensity was pretty strong, and we wanted the plane to avoid a bad situation,” explains Michael Goodman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which manages the project. “Prior to the RTMM, when we would do airborne field experiments, the planes would take off and those of us on the ground couldn’t follow them,” Goodman says.

Besides keeping aircraft out of harm’s way, program managers use the RTMM to ensure that scientists stay near the action. “These are dynamic weather situations,” Goodman says, “so we are much better able to coordinate our assets if we know where a plane is in relation to the weather.” The goal, after all, is to study storms up close, and that often means playing dodgeball with lightning.

Launch the RTMM here.

Arctic Eye

Time-lapse views of melting ice caps reveal disturbing changes
As a research scientist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Walt Meier has spent uncountable hours examining satellite images of ice caps. “Generally we just look at images side by side,” Meier says. But spotting dynamic trends with static pictures isn’t easy. Last year, Meier and his colleagues began adding daily images of Arctic sea ice to Google Earth. “We animated, in a time series, a set of still images, and we immediately saw something crazy going on.” In just two months, more than half the Arctic sea ice had vanished.

Thin Ice: The ice cap last September [left] and October [right], along with the past average ice cover in those months [pink outline] Photo by Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, University of Alaska–Fairbanks/Google Earth

In the meantime, NSIDC glaciologists have integrated ice data from around the globe with Google Earth. They’ve animated 25 years of vanishing ice in Greenland and the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica and documented peripatetic icebergs in the South Atlantic Ocean, dwindling permafrost, and receding glaciers in Alaska. For anyone who still doubts that Earth’s ice is creeping toward extinction, Meier has a movie to show you.

View NSIDC data on Google Earth here.

The Flight of the Bird Flu

Tracking an ever-changing virus could help stop a pandemic
Influenza viruses have a nasty habit of mutating constantly. This makes it hard for scientists to develop effective vaccines. Just when virologists think they’ve got the little buggers figured out, a virus morphs bits of its genome to remain a cunning infection machine. Daniel Janies, a professor of zoology at Ohio State University’s department of biomedical informatics, has been tracking these mutations in the H5N1 avian-flu virus for years. But once he loaded his data into Google Earth to map changes in RNA by location, he saw something unexpected. “Not only was the virus moving westward,” Janies says, “it was mutating in a way that allowed it to infect mammals, making it more dangerous to human populations.”

Hot Zones: Lines on this map track how individual strains of the avian flu spread out from Southeast Asia. Photo by Daniel Janies et al./Ohio State University

Janies is now tracking 1,000 avian-flu strains, or “isolates”—more than three times what he started with—as they march around the globe. He’s building a Google Earth database for seasonal influenza. And his team is mapping H5N1’s resistance to certain drugs by location, a project that could help stop a potential pandemic. Knowing where and when the virus mutates is critical to developing a vaccine. “If there is a human outbreak,” he says, “we want to be able to get new virus data at 5 p.m., let our supercomputers run with it overnight, and give you an updated mutation map in the morning.”

Download the H5N1 Visualization for Google Earth here [KMZ file]

Copyright: Popsci