Free Geography Tools

If you were wondering how I created the Google Earth rainfall plot in yesterday’s post on FAO climate data, I didn’t use one of the shapefile to KML converters I’ve posted about. Instead, I used a free program called GE-Graph that takes tabular data and lets you plot it in colors and polygons that depend on the value you’re plotting.

You can enter data directly in GE-Graph using its table editor, including pasting columns from a spreadsheet, but it will also accept CSV-format text data createable in a spreadsheet in the proper format:Name, latitude, longitude, value to be plotted (data only, no column headers).

Open the data in GE-Graph (click on image for larger view):

Here you can set:

Graph of Type: Flat (pinned to the ground, with colors describing the data value) or 3D (Polygons, with the number of sides set by the dropdown). You can also link data to a custom KML polygon file (e.g. state borders), and use those as the plotted shapes.

Height (3D only): Whether the height varies with the data value or not

Color: Whether the color of the polygon or flat area varies with the data value; colors set using the Color Scale section

Size: The size of the flat area or polygon as plotted in Google Earth

… and so on – you can set the specific scales for the data, or have GE-Graph do that automatically, enter labels, specify a grid, etc.. There’s a full help section included with the program.

Here’s the plot from yesterday’s post, created with the above settings and data, as displayed in Google Earth:

More examples of the kinds of plots that GE-Graph can create, along with the download link, are available at the GE-Graph website.

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