A lot of people out there are apparently weather fanatics like me. While I'm typically more of a news junkie, I am absolutely fascinated by weather, which tends to go along with my interest in climate change and other environmental issues. It all started in the 9th grade when my earth science teacher, fresh out of college, managed to draw my attention away from girls long enough to seed a life-long interest in weather science that has continued to grow as I've gotten older.

My interest in the weather grew even more after I joined the Coast Guard, especially since lives depend on weather knowledge when you're at sea. Since then I've continued to grow my interest in weather. I'm no expert, by any means, but I like to think I have a better than average understanding of what is happening with the weather on any given day.

Now, with a sister living in St. Louis, I have a little more of a personal interest in the weather, namely the flooding that's taking place along the Mississippi River. And when my interest gets piqued, I generally start looking for datasets I can open up in Google Earth. Ideally I'd like to find satellite imagery overlays to show current flooding on the map itself, but I haven't found that. What I have found, though, is probably the next best thing.

The National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey have a few .kml files you can open up in Google Earth (or any other mapping software that supports the .kml file format). Here they are...

• USGS Water Watch: An interactive map that shows real time water flow in streams and rivers. Link to the .kml file is at the bottom of the page.
• NWS River Data: Similar data to the USGS data, but presented a little differently.
• guiWeather KML Warehouse: Several very cool weather overlays that are informative, although not specific to flooding.
• NOAA Realtime WDSSII Data: Realtime weather data from NOAA, with a variety of different overlays
• SSEC Data: University of Wisconsin-Madison's Space Science & Engineering Center has a number of different satellite image overlays available
• NASA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission: This one is very cool, and the page has a ton of different rainfall total datasets that can be loaded into Google Earth.

I have more kml files that I personally use, but don't have links to their sources at the moment. I'll have to dig them out and upload the actual .kml files to the server for direct download but can't do that from here. I'll try to get them up when I get home later this evening.

If you have others that I haven't listed here, please feel free to add them in the comments and I'll put them up in the main post.

UPDATE: I found a massively comprehensive list of weather overlays for Google Earth at Wunder Blog from Weather Underground. They list just about everything you can think of, and even more.

UPDATE 2: Found it! Here's an overlay graphic taken from NASA's Terra satellite showing the flooded areas and breached levies in the Midwest. Click Here to get it.

UPDATE 3: More! If you're looking for more current, up to date images you can go to the MODIS Rapid Response System page from NASA and get the latest images in a variety of resolutions.

This file is a 250 meter resolution image that clearly shows where the levies have failed in much higher detail than the file linked above. It is a very large file, though, and may take a minute or so to download. You can also download it directly from the NASA MODIS page I linked.

UPDATE 4:I pulled the link to the 250m image because it was killing my bandwidth. Someone has been downloading it pretty much non-stop for a couple of days so rather than run into bandwidth limit problems, I decided to get rid of the link. You can still download the file from the MODIS website.