Met Office Surface stations on Google Earth
The Google Earth application provides you with an
interactive map of the whole world that you can navigate and zoom in on using your mouse.
The BADC has made the locations of Met Office MIDAS observation stations available as files that you can load
into Google Earth. Selected stations can be displayed as points on the map. Clicking on a point shows a pop-up box containing summary details for the station and a link to
a page at the BADC giving full details.
This has some similarities to our
web-based Map search. However, once you have
installed Google Earth and downloaded the necessary files, the user interface is richer and the
performance is far superior.
To use the Google Earth map, do the following:
- If you do not already have the Google Earth client installed, go to
http://earth.google.com
and install it. Please note that Google Earth may not run on older machines.
-
Download the files containing the station details. The station details are contained in two files. You can download
either or both of these files, according to your search requirements:
- MIDAS stations by area (last updated Mar 2017), which allows you to display the stations according to the area it is
located (UK county, country etc).
- MIDAS stations by message type (last updated Mar 2017), which allows you to display the stations according to the
Message type they produce.
Depending upon your browser, these links may allow you to open the file directly into Google Earth.
Alternatively you may need to save the file to your computer and then open it from Google
Earth using File->open from the menubar.
These files will be updated with the latest data available from the Met Office several times a year.
Due to the number of stations, they are not immediately displayed on the map. To display the stations on the map,
go to the Places list in Google Earth's sidebar, expand the MIDAS stations by area or
MIDAS stations by message type documents and the click the check box in the appropriate sub-folders. For
example,
in MIDAS stations by area you can select to display all stations in the UK, or only stations in a given county. Expand all of the directory
tree to see what other options are possible. In MIDAS stations by message type you can select to display stations
according to the type of message they produce.
Stations which are currently collecting data are displayed as green markers, while 'closed' stations are displayed
with a red marker. Note that even if a station is closed it may still have
recorded data for the time period you require.
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