In this section we will learn how to convert the concentration contour output for display in Google Earth. Again we will be using the graphic that was generated in the previous section, so if you do not have this available, you need to go back and do this calculation.  I will not review those steps again.  Also it requires Google Earth for display.  If you do not have Google Earth installed on your computer, you should do that first as well, you need to go to the Google Earth or Google download page.

So this is actually also very simple to do.  If you go to the concentration display program after you have completed the simulation, all that is required is that you check the button for GIS output in KML/KMZ. The difference between the two is the KML is the basic file with the contours that gets displayed, that's short for Keyhole Markup Language, and the KMZ file is the zip file of the KML, but it includes additional files, such as the graphics on the corners, and contour intervals, and other supplemental information that Google Earth uses for display.  

In any event that's all we need to do is select this, and then execute display. And there should be a message here that got hidden, let me just close this, showing that the KML/KMZ file was created in the working directory. Note that when you're doing these conversions, where you don't care necessarily about the output, you can turn off the view on option, so this will only do the conversion without opening the graphic.  And it says that it created this HYSPLITconc.kmz file in the working directory.

So we need to go to the working directory.  For various reasons the graphical user interface cannot launch off the Google Earth application, so you have to do this independently.  And as I said this is a zip file that contains multiple files.  If you, well at least on some computer systems, there maybe an issue with creating the zip file and all you may have is the KML file, but Google Earth will display the KML file as well.

And of course we zoomed in on the on the release point, I’m going to un-zoom here, finally, here we go. So the KML contains the contours but the KMZ contains additional files such as this graphic here that identifies the contour intervals, as well as the NOAA label, and also if you're familiar you can look at the different layers and turn things on and off within this display.  Note that the map background information, that the shapefiles for instance, were not carried over to Google Earth, the only thing carried over are the contours.

And that concludes our discussion of display in Google Earth.