The Call for Papers for this year's UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (Oxford, 7-9 December 2009) is now out.  There is an Environmental and Earth Sciences theme:

The Computers & Geosciences journal invites authors to submit papers for a special issue on "Virtual Globes in Science", which will highlight how Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and Virtual Globes have been used for facilitating Geoscience research. This issue will focus on exploring the work highlighted at the Virtual Globes sessions at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), however, it is open also to any innovative contributions on this topic.

Scientific fields of study can include, but are not limited to:

The website and abstract submission are open for ISDE6, in Beijing, September 9-12 2009.

http://www.isde6.org/

The 25 November 2008 issue of Eos (which has only just reached me) leads with an article called "Informatics and the 2007-2008 Electronic Geophysical Year" (Baker et al), which concludes with a plea for authors to submit papers that highlight informatics.  See also the eGY website.

(I am collecting a list of relevant journals for earth science informatics at http://delicious.com/jonblower/journals .)

This looks useful for experimenting with KML features.  Requires Google Earth plugin so currently only works on Windows.

http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-kml-interactive-sampler.htm

Google and the University of Michigan are co-hosting a conference focused on exploring science data visualization in Google Earth, Google Maps, and KML, on October 22nd and 23rd in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The two-day event will bring together academics, researchers and students from all over the country to discuss the scientific uses of virtual globes and how that technology is enabling newer and richer data interaction experiences for both expert and novice users. Keynote speakers include Tim Killeen, Assistant Director for Geosciences at the National Science Foundation, and Dan Adkins, former Director of the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure. Google engineers will be on hand to work directly with students and scientists on ways to overcome technical problems and to provide training for those interested in advanced techniques with KML.

http://googleearthconference.engin.umich.edu/overview.php

September 9-12, 2009   Beijing, China

*** Abstract Deadline: 30 Nov., 2008 ***

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http://www.isde6.org  
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First Announcement & Call for Papers

Dear Colleagues,

We are cordially inviting you to attend the 6^th International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE6) with the theme of Digital Earth in Action in Beijing, China in September 2009. The International Symposium on Digital Earth has been successfully held in China (1999), Canada (2001), Czech Republic (2003), Japan (2005) and the United States (2007). The ISDE6 will mark the 10th anniversary of the birth of such an International symposium dedicated to Digital Earth.

ISDE6 aims to provide an international forum for world-class scientists, engineers and educators engaged in the fields of digital earth, earth observation, geo-informatics and relevant applications to review the progress of Digital Earth during the last decade and discuss the achievements of Digital Earth and the recent developments. Attached please find the detailed information about ISDE6.

This Symposium will be sponsored by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and organized by the Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth, CAS and the Chinese National Committee for ISDE.

For more information, please visit the symposium website http://www.isde6.org or email the secretariat at [email protected] . We will be very grateful if you can circulate this call for paper to your colleagues.

We are looking forward to your attendance!

ISDE6 Secretariat                                                               

Email: [email protected]                                                      

Tel.: 86-10-58887298/ 58887297   Fax: 86-10-58887302                           

URL : www.isde6.org                                                         

Address: 14 Floor, Kedian Building, No.9 Beiyitiao, Haidian District, Zhongguancun, Beijing  100190, China

Here's a really nice application of Google Earth for visualizing ash plumes and directing aircraft around them, from Pete Webley, University of Alaska Volcano Observatory:

http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-06/google-eart

(Picture from Google Earth/University of Alaska)

Here are some links to various KML feeds displaying Argo data (thanks to Mathieu Belbeoch of JCOMMOPS):

Active/Inactive Floats & Trajectories
http://argo.jcommops.org/FTPRoot/Argo/Status/status.kmz    
http://argo.jcommops.org/FTPRoot/Argo/Status/inactive.kmz

NEW (active/inactive floats, all deployments, deployment plans, network density/age/planned density - without trajectories - under construction)
http://argo.jcommops.org/FTPRoot/Argo/Status/ARGO_FULL.kmz 

Other Argo layers:
http://www.coriolis.eu.org/cdc/google_earth.htm
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/argo/argoGE.htm

It's interesting to combine these feeds with this dataset of daily sea-ice concentration:
http://nsidc.org/data/google_earth/noaa/NSIDC_NISE.kml

Here's a Google site that collects some interesting KML layers highlighting the environment, climate change, science and technology.

http://earth.google.co.uk/outreach/env_science.html