The most common question I hear from GeoServer users is:  “Who else is using GeoServer?”  So when I find a great example of GeoServer in the wild, I like to pass it along.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado has a large collection of freely downloadable data, and they are serving this data with KML for viewing in virtual globe environments such as Google Earth.  Buried in their Google Earth Technical Experiments page, they have the World Glacier Inventory, the location and attributes of thousands of glaciers throughout the world.

The NSIDC uses GeoServer to serve this data and to export KML files.  Lisa Ballagh of the NSIDC recently gave a talk at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, where she described why and how her organization uses GeoServer. This short talk is interesting and well worth a watch, and the images of glaciers as they have changed over time are truly striking.

Check out the NSIDC site, download the WGI data, and view it in Google Earth.  And look for the World Glacier Inventory to be available on Google Maps soon, as part of GeoServer’s integration with Google’s Geo Search.