The Google Earth application has had some impressive success over the last period. The Mountain View company has brought its product a number of important upgrades, which made feature more options for its users. We have also seen Google Earth being used as a rescue tool providing satellite imagery of the recently affected areas in Myanmar and Sichuan. As you probably known, Google tries to improve the quality of its products and a recent event just goes to exemplify this.

The Mountain View company has collaborated with the University of Colorado, Boulder, as part of their initiative to make information more readily available. The collaboration resulted into an event held for the scientists and researchers in Colorado. The event's main focus was to find a way to use KLM and Google Earth to help students, policy makers and the general public, to better understand scientific research. According to the official Google Earth blog, the event has been hosted by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics as part of the Electronic Geophysical Year program.

It appears that it was a success if we are to consider the large number of attendants, who came to present their work. Among the participants, there were a number of scientists from a dozen of organizations including The National Center of Atmospheric Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Snow and Ice Data Center, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, USGS and IPCC.

The event included tutorial sessions for all skill levels meant to demonstrate tricks and techniques for displaying large amounts of data, translating data formats, and using KML to describe complex data sets. One of the attendants, Dan Baker, Director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, wanted to point out the importance of the collaboration between the Google team and the Boulder community.