Shortly after the launch of Google Earth, a band of oceanographers led by legendary ocean researcher Sylvia Earle stomped into Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

“Hey look, you can call it Google Dirt, but you can’t call it Google Earth if you ain’t got the oceans in there,” said Kathryn Sullivan, a former NASA astronaut who until recently was administrator of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), paraphrasing how that conversation went as part of a keynote talk last week.

Sullivan was speaking at the 2017 Esri Ocean GIS Forum in Redlands, California.

“It’s been a long time coming that GIS really could deal with the three-quarters of the planet that’s not dirt,” she said, before launching into a conversation on metocean science, the combined study of meteorology and oceanography.

Read the source article at Devex International Development