Aug 19, 2011 08:10 GMT  ·  By

Google Maps now shows weather information on top of the regular maps. It's one of those things that seems obvious in retrospect, yet it's taken Google this long to enable it. There is current info for most major cities around the world and there's also cloud layer data.

You can get more detailed information and predictions for each city where data is available.

"Whether you’re organizing a trip overseas or a picnic at a local park, knowing the weather forecast is a crucial part of the planning process," Jonah Jones, User Experience Designer at Google, writes.

"Today, we’re adding a weather layer on Google Maps that displays current temps and conditions around the globe, and will hopefully make travel and activity planning easier," he announced.

Google Maps is very useful when planning a trip and this is what it's used for most of the time. Also useful when planning a trip is weather data, it's surprising that Google didn't think of bringing the two together sooner.

Google relies on data from Weather.com for the current conditions and the five-day predictions. Of course, weather data is not exactly hard to come by online, but it's nice to have everything in one place rather than switching back and forth through several sites.

Interestingly enough, Google Maps also has cloud data, so you can see exactly which areas are covered by clouds. This data comes from the US Naval Research Lab.

If you want more details for any location, click on the city and you'll get a five-day prediction by default, with links for a 10-day prediction or a hourly one which lead to Weather.com.

You can enable the weather layer just like all of the others and you can customize it to show or hide clouds, or use different units for the temperature or wind speed.