Driving Google Earth from Fortran

Google Earth provides a radical improvement over previous generations of geospatial visualization applications. By offering a well-documented input data format, KML, it enables researchers to visualize existing data from multiple sources, as well as data they might produce themselves, on a common geographical canvas. However, this requires having data available in KML. Many computational programs in use across the geosciences are written in Fortran; and many researchers are most comfortable writing in Fortran. Building on earlier work where we constructed a general XML Fortran library, we have written a KML output library which enables the direct output from Fortran programs of scientific data in KML format, without post-processing, and requiring no knowledge of KML on the user's part.