Abstract

We present two seismology research projects that had been ported to web technologies and resulted in KML layers, finding in Google Earth a flexible platform capable of substituting specialized graphical tools in performing qualitative comparisons on the data-sets. The KML layer for the European Regional Centroid Moment Tensor Catalog displays the focal mechanism solutions (beach balls) for moderate-magnitude Earthquake from 1997 to present. Two methodologies for beach balls generation and management were tested: simple import of externally-generated gif files and straight KML implementation. The <Region> KML tag was exploited to generate resolution-dependent queries and avoid the informative cluttering often seen in printed focal mechanism plots. The Neries Tomographic Earth Model Repository contains data-sets from over 20 models from literature; a hierarchical structure of folders representing each model's set of depths is easily implemented in KML, and immediately results into an intuitive interface for users to freely navigate and compare the hundreds of tomographic plots corresponding to the Model-Depths 2D matrix. The KML code is based on <NetworkLink> calls to interface with remote scripts and download the data for a certain sublayer only when needed.