December 4, 2019

Google Earth and topo overlays

The idea here is to be able to layer USGS topographic maps onto Google Earth. I have not made it work yet though. I followed the above links and downloaded NGS_Topo_US_2D.kmz. I then start up Google Earth (Google Earth "Pro" on my Fedora 30 linux system). I use File open to open the file, the globe spins around to show me Africa and no topo layer when I get back to the USA. Probably this plugin or whatever it is no longer works with the current version of Google Earth. Google is legendary for changing interfaces and having no rigid specs in particular, so this would not be surprising.

Interestingly this is a 683 byte file (mighty small). It is a zip archive (maybe all kmz files are) -- when expanded (via unzip NGS_Topo_US_2D.kmz) I get a kml file. This is NGS_Topo_US_2D.kml and is 1834 bytes in size (still pretty small). This is an XML file and can be inspected with any ascii editor. The key line has the following URL reference: 

http://services.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/NGS_Topo_US_2D/MapServer/kml/regions/0-0-0.kmz?
As of 12-2019, this is still online and available: So this is another project for me, and perhaps this thing can be revived. I should try it perhaps with my Windows copy of Google Earth. No time now. I had hoped this would just work.

Some other work on this general topic:

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org