The Google Earth application provides you with an interactive map of the whole world that you can navigate and zoom in on using your mouse. CEDA has made the locations of Met Office MIDAS observation stations available as files that you can load into Google Earth. Selected stations can be displayed as points on the map. Clicking on a point shows a pop-up box containing summary details for the station and a link to a page at CEDA giving full details. This has some similarities to our web-based Map search. However, once you have installed Google Earth and downloaded the necessary files, the user interface is richer and the performance is superior.

To use the Google Earth map, do the following:

• If you do not already have the Google Earth client installed, go to http://earth.google.com and install it. Please note that Google Earth may not run on older machines.

• Download the files containing the station details. The station details are contained in two files. You can download either or both of these files, according to your search requirements:
  1. MIDAS stations by area (last updated June 2022), which allows you to display the stations according to the area it is located (UK county, country etc).

  2. MIDAS stations by message type (last updated June 2022), which allows you to display the stations according to the Message type they produce.

Depending upon your browser, these links may allow you to open the file directly into Google Earth. Alternatively you may need to save the file to your computer and then open it from Google Earth using File->open from the menubar.

These files will be updated with the latest data available from the Met Office several times a year.

Due to the number of stations, they are not immediately displayed on the map. To display the stations on the map, go to the Places list in Google Earth's sidebar, expand the MIDAS stations by area or MIDAS stations by message type documents and the click the check box in the appropriate sub-folders. For example, in MIDAS stations by area you can select to display all stations in the UK, or only stations in a given county. Expand all of the directory tree to see what other options are possible. In MIDAS stations by message type you can select to display stations according to the type of message they produce.

Stations which are currently collecting data are displayed as green markers, while 'closed' stations are displayed with a red marker. Note that even if a station is closed it may still have recorded data for the time period you require.