Earth Browser Users Guide

Transcription

1 Earth Browser Users Guide

2 Earth Browser Users Guide Contents What is Earth Browser?... 3 Getting Started... 3 System Requirements... 3 Downloading... 3 Browsing the Earth... 4 Your Tools... 4 Hand Tool...4 Zoom Tools...4 Default View...4 The Earth... 5 Stars... 5 High Resolution Earth Maps... 6 Earth Data... 7 Weather Forecasts... 7 Clouds... 8 Day/Night Shadow... 8 Webcams... 9 Earthquakes Volcanoes Grid City/Location List Customizing the City's Appearance Creating Your Own Cities Daylight Animation Favorite Views Preferences Appearance Settings Control Settings Screen Saver Using Proxy Server Empty Cache... 14

3 What is Earth Browser? Earth Browser is a real-time three dimensional model of the Earth with continuously updating night shadows and clouds. It uses an advanced raytracing algorithm and a high resolution satellite image to produce an extremely accurate picture of the Earth. The globe can be easily rotated and magnified to give a distant or close up view of the Earth from space. Daily real-time satellite updates The clouds are updated four times daily and are automatically downloaded and displayed when an internet connection is present. Cloud images are provided by National the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center. System Requirements Getting Started Macintosh PowerPC (Windows version available soon) Mac OS 7.6 or greater Quicktime 3.0 or higher 13 MB Ram 3 MB Disk Space Internet Connection Downloading You can download Earth Browser from our downloads page. Installation Installing is as simple as decompressing the StuffIt archive using the free StuffIt Expander application. If you don't have StuffIt Expander, you can download it from here.

4 Your Tools Browsing the Earth The tools window contains buttons to help you manipulate the Earth. There are ten buttons in the tools window, four of which allow you to control your view of the Earth and six that toggle the display of information overlays. Hand Tool The Hand tool allows you to grab the Earth and position it however you desire. Just click and drag the globe in any direction to center it wherever you wish. Dragging it horizontally will set the globe spinning on its axis. If you release the drag while it is still rotating, it will continue to rotate. Hint: Hold down the shift key to center the view on where you click. Hold downcontrol key for the Zoom in tool,control+option for the Zoom out tool. Hint: You can use the right and left arrow keys to rotate the Earth and set it spinning. Zoom Tools There are two zoom tools; in and out. Clicking on the Earth when using the tool will zoom in/out until you let go of the mouse button. The Earth will slowly rotate to center on where your mouse is located as you zoom in or out. Hint: Hold the Control key down for the Hand tool. Hint: You can use the up and down arrow keys to zoom in or out. Default View The default view button is very simple, click on it and it will zoom out to a full view of the Earth and start it rotating.

5 The Earth The main window of Earth Browser shows you what the Earth currently looks like from space. The day/night shadow updates once every five minutes and the clouds are downloaded and mapped onto the Earth from six different satellite images. The Earth is always aligned on its polar axis and can be freely rotated about that axis. Yellow dots on the globe indicate the position of cities around the world, these "lights" are easier to see when they are on the shadowed half of the globe. When you move the Hand tool over these lights, a city name will pop up displaying the city and time of the location you are hovering over. If the color of the city text is yellow, that means the city has weather information, a green color denotes no weather information. Stars The stars in the background of Earth Browser rotate when the Earth and is rotated. They have a few obvious constellations in them but do not attempt to accurately portray the positions of the stars or constellations. Hint:If you do not like the stars they can be turned off in the preferences.

6 High Resolution Earth Maps Demo Resolution Registered Resolution Hawaiian Islands? Hawaiian Islands! The resolution in the demo version of Earth Browser is somewhat limited. When you purchase a registered copy of Earth Browser, you are then able to download and utilize the high resolution map files. These high resolution images will increase the resolution up to 25 times that of the demo version. This comes at a cost however, the maps take up an extra 38 Megabytes of disk space and are a 6 Megabyte download. They are worth it!

7 Clicking on another weather icon in the main window will set the contents of the Weather Forecast Window to that location. This will work for cities that don't have weather icons too, just make the hand tool hover over a city and click on it when its name pops up. This only works for cities that have weather available however (yellow names, not green). Hint: Clicking on the flag will launch your default web-browser into the CIA's World Factbook page for that country. This is an excellent source for all sorts of educational information about all countries in the world. Disclaimer: Information should not be relied on in lieu of officially disseminated weather information. Earth Data Weather Forecasts Turn on and off the display of weather by clicking on the weather button (thermometer) in the tool window. Earth Browser has weather conditions for over 450 cities across the world updated throughout the day. The data includes the city's temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and pressure, it also includes a 5 day forecast for the location. Weather icons are displayed above selected cities showing its current weather. More cities become visible the closer you zoom in and then disappear as you zoom out. This is done to keep the icons from crowding too close to each other. You can control the level at which the icons display in the Cities Window. Clicking on a weather icon will bring up the Weather Forecast window which displays the current conditions, five day forecast, current time and the flag for the country the city is located in. Weather Forecast Window

8 Clouds Control the display of clouds by clicking on the cloud button in the tool window. Turn it off and then on again to check for new cloud updates. The clouds are generated by extracting the cloud information from 6 different satellite images in patches. Each of these images has different update schedules, Earth Browser attempts to keep the clouds as up to date as possible by downloading each image as it is updated. Satellite Image Schedule Satellite Coverage Area Update Frequency Source GOES 8 Americas/Atlantic 8 times/day NOAA GOES10 Americas/Pacific 8 times/day NOAA METEOSAT Europe & Africa 4 times/day NOAA INDOEX India & Central Asia 4 times/day NOAA GMS Australia & Pacific 24 times/day NOAA SSEC Composite Polar Regions 6 times/day SSEC Day/Night Shadow Control the display of the day/night shadow by clicking on the shadow button (black/white circle) in the tool window. The shadow is updated every five minutes and can even be animated. The shadow covers the north pole completely in the summer and the south pole completely in the winter taking the seasons into account. This is a great way to teach children why the seasons change and why it gets dark early in the winter.

9 Webcams What is a webcam? A webcam is a camera connected to the internet that publishes its image. Control the display of the webcams by clicking on the webcam button (camera) in the tool window. More webcams become visible the closer you zoom in and then disappear as you zoom out, just like the weather icons. Some locations have more than one webcam and will display a menu to choose from when clicking on it. Some webcams update more frequently than others and some suffer from frequent outages. There are no guarantees about the availability or timeliness of the webcam images, and the list of available webcams can change without warning. Once a webcam is selected it will display a window that contains the webcam image, the time it was last updated (in your local time) and a clickable link to the webpage that hosts this webcam. Please click on the links often, many of these webcams are supported by the advertisements displayed on the websites containing them. The red arrow button in the upper left hand corner will force a reload of the webcam image.

10 Earthquakes Earthquake information is provided by the USGS earthquake finger server. This information is updated many times per day, as needed. The server listst the latest 21 major earthquakes around the world including the time, location and estimated magnitude of the quake. Generally earthquakes with a magnitude less than 3 are not listed. The Earth Browser display will show earthquakes as a colored dot over the location of the quake. The number inside the dot indicates its approximate magnitude. The color of the dot indicates its approximate age. Holding the cursor over the earthquake dot will give information about the exact size, time and location of the quake. Newest Newer Older Oldest Volcanoes Earthquake Colors Volcano information is provided by Volcano World at the University of North Dakota. This information is updated fairly often, it contains a list of currently active volcanoes from around the world. The volcanoes show up as a red triangle on the Earth centered on the location of the volcano. Holding the cursor over the icon will display the name of the volcano. Clicking on the icon will take you to the website for the volcano that you clicked on. The site contains pictures, observations and activity reports for that particular volcano and it is updated as more information is acquired. Grid The grid option allows you to put a latitude/longitude grid over the Earth. You can specify the spacing between the grid lines and whether you want numerical markers or not in the Grid Options dialog. You activate the grid and change its settings from the Commands menu.

11 City/Location List The city list is perhaps the most complex part of Earth Browser. It contains the entire list of cities that Earth Browser knows about. From this dialog you can customize your Earth Browser display, add and delete your own cities, locate a particular city or find out information about a particular country. Double clicking on a city in the list will rotate the Earth display to hilight that city. Clicking on a country flag will go to the CIA's world factbook on that country. Customizing the City's Appearance If a city has weather information available (not all do), you can set the zoom level at which that city's weather icon becomes visible. This is also how you can hide a city's weather icon if you do not want to see it anymore. The procedure is simple, just set your Earth Browser main view to the level at which you want the weather icon to be displayed at and move the slider toward the 100% setting until the weather icon becomes visible. The farther to the right you set the slider, the farther distance from the Earth the weather icon will be visible at. You can add the time of the city to the weather icon display by checking the "Show Time" checkbox. If a city does not have weather information, you will have the option of displaying just the city's time at a particular zoom level instead.

12 Creating Your Own Cities To add a city of your own, just click the "New City..." button or select "New City" from the Command menu. Your city will show up in bold in the city list. You can only delete the cities that you have created yourself, all other cities are updated dynamically by Earth Browser. Note: You cannot add weather information to a city. All of the cities that you create will have no Daylight Animation If you would like to see what the night shadow looks like at a particular date and time, you can set that in the Daylight Animation window, located in the Window menu. It is simple, just set the calendar and time to the desired time and click the "Update Shadows" button (or hit return). The shadows on the Earth will display what it would look like at that date/time. The "Set To Now" button resets the calendar to the current time. If you would like to see the shadows move across the earth in an animated fashion, just set the time lapse that you want and click the "Start Animation" button. The shadows will update every second or so increasing the time every step. To stop it, the button turns into a "Stop Animation" button, just click it again. Closing the window will also stop the animation and reset the shadow display to the current time. Favorite Views The Favorite Views window is a list of view settings that allows you to switch quickly between one view of the Earth to another. Double clicking on a view name will rotate the Earth in the main view to that view setting. To add a favorite view, set the main Earth Browser window to the view you wish to save and click the "Save Current..." button at the bottom of the window. To delete a view, drag it onto the trashcan button or select it and hit the trashcan button.

13 Appearance Settings Show Stars - Display rotating star field, turning it off makes rotation faster. Show City Lights - Yellow dots on cities go away if off. Show Coordinates - When on the latitude and longitude of the cursor are displayed. Show Help Text - Tool tip windows describing button actions. Control Settings Connect Automatically - Initiate an internet connection if one not already present. Use Metric Values - When on the temperature, pressure and wind speed values are displayed in Metric units, English units when it is off. Anchor Weather Window - When on the weather forecast window will stay anchored to the main window. Anchor Tool Window - When on the tools window will stay anchored.

14 Screen Saver Turn this on for Earth Browser to behave like a screen saver. Active After The screen saver will activate after this many minutes. Show Weather / Clouds / Earthquakes Turn on or off display options Rotating Make the earth rotate when in the screen saver. Using Proxy Server If you are running Earth Browser on a machine that goes through a proxy server or firewall, you must fill in the proxy settings here. You can get your proxy settings by looking in your web browser preferences or contacting your system administrator. Empty Cache This button will remove all of Earth Browser's cached files. This forces a refresh of all weather data, webcam images and city information. When you restart Earth Browser, it will reload all of its data. Copyright 2000 Lunar Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Adobe Acrobat version of the User Manual was created by Glenn Heck