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Week 1

In the beginning of the week I was introduced to Google Earth version 5 and all of its new functions with the markup language KML. KML is very closely related to XML. Nevertheless, KML is only meant to be used with Google Earth. There is also .kmz, which is a file type that can be used when saving a .kml file. The only use that has is if you have images included with your .kml, and you would want them to be displayed on any computer.

With KML I was able to put all of the CMOP stations on the map and a description of them. The description is supposed to focus on the salinity of the water (note: the values I used for now are all static). All of the stations are organized in folders, that way they are not scattered. After I added the stations I had to place cylinders on the stations’ locations, which will be used to indicate the amounts of salinity in the water by height. However, Google Earth has no easy way or built in tools that would help to insert cylinders. Since one can only use polygons as a means for adding any type of shape in KML, I had to think of a way for making a circle out of a polygon. The height of the cylinder was no problem; the only problem I faced was making circles out of polygons. It’s a good thing that I recalled my Trig, so with that knowledge in mind, I successfully created a program in C++ that gave me the appropriate and necessary amount of coordinates to make a good looking cylinder. The only stations that have cylinders are those which are not down. After I created the cylinders, I had to scale them accordingly to the salinity indicated by each of the stations.

This was the best image I could've got for a preview, or else it would be too large.