This submission is designed to illustrate the effectiveness of using Google Earth visualizations to convey hydrologic information. The presentation is divided into several parts. After an introduction, there is a section describing the usefulness of using Google Earth to display spatial data, a section highlighting the overlay of static map coverages in Google Earth such as USGS topographic overlays and maps representing various topographic characteristics, and a section pertaining to my current modeling efforts, during which, we visualize dynamic model outputs in Google Earth. I created these visualizations to study the landscape in a distributed manner because I am examining how hydrologic variables are influenced by aspect (slope direction), which is variable across a terrain. However, there are also many other reasons to visualize hydrologic data in Google Earth. This type of visualization is powerful because maps can be extremely informative, and using maps as a presentation tool is a convincing way to communicate to an audience. In addition, all of the maps and animations presented here become more tangible and exciting (and hopefully more effective) in Google Earth’s life-like 3-D environment, which allows them to be explored in a variety of ways.
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