After the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) developed the Environmental Response Management Application(ERMA). ERMA provides numerous datasets as overlays on Google maps, providing useful information for response organizations.
Now with tropical storm Isaac making its way through the Gulf Coast, Google created an application with the same purpose. The Crisis Map provides the same functionality as ERMA but for Hurricane Isaac. Some of the Crisis Map’s data is even provided by NOAA.
It seems Google has teamed up with many other organizations with their project Google Crisis Response. Since hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 Google has since been responding to natural disasters by making useful information available to responders. On the site they provide numerous tools such as Google Public Alerts and Google Person Finder to help the public help themselves.
After looking through the list of Google’s tools on the Crisis page I decided to look into Custom Google Maps. It turns out that Google provides an excellent API for their Maps. All you need is a free key provided by Google and you can add a Google Map to your web page! Here is the Javascript with a few options added:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=THE_KEY_FROM_GOOGLE&sensor=false”> </script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
function initialize() {
var mapOptions = {
center: new google.maps.LatLng(43.076712,-70.762072),
zoom: 8,
mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.SATELLITE
};
var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById(“div_id”),
mapOptions);
}
</script>
That’s it!!!!!
The API documentation includes detailed instructions on how to customize your map and even add overlays, like the ones in the Crisis Map. I obtained a key of my own and I am pretty excited to play around with this.
It’s great to see such a powerful company use their resources to help people. My faith in Google seems to increase every day.