Track the State of the Planet with Discovery's Earth Live

The home office (remember, TreeHugger is owned by Discovery Communications) has been working hard to create a cool new web application called Earth Live. It's a new interactive tool (just launched today) designed to help us all understand global climate change on a macro level; you can do so using almost real-time satellite data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showing cloud cover, sea temperatures, the jet stream, and much more.

There's a handful of "stories," with long-term climate changes relating to the biosphere and gulf stream, and more timely, news-related stories as well, including events like the tornados in the southeastern US last week, Hurricane Katrina, and La Nina; each of the stories can be "plugged in" to the map to show what regional and global effects the climate is having, and what the implications are for those events.

Be sure to click the "Here's how to use it" button to take advantage of all the features it has to offer -- once you start discovering your own correlations between data and global changes, you can publish them to your blog, or Facebook, for example -- and try not to get fired for playing with it too much at work; there's a lot to see, and a lot to learn. Even if we didn't work for Discovery, we'd still think it was pretty awesome. ::Discovery's Earth Live