(Cross-posted from the Google LatLong Blog)

This past week, several devastating tornadoes struck across a wide swathe of the southern United States. Our Crisis Response team is activating to provide data and imagery we hope will be useful to first responders and the general public.

In cooperation with our satellite partner GeoEye, we have imagery of the aftermath of several tornadoes, including in Tuscaloosa, Alabama as shown below. We have created several before-and-after comparisons in a Picasa album.

Left: Google imagery from late 2010. Right: GeoEye imagery from Thursday, April 28.
Top: Charleston Square Apartments, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Bottom: Towns of Pleasant Grove, Concord, and Hueytown, Jefferson County, Alabama. Click to see enlarged.

This imagery, as well as data sets such as Red Cross shelter locations and tornado touchdown reports, are available in this collection on Google Maps. We will continue to add imagery and data as it comes available.

Our heart goes out to everyone affected by this tragic event.

Posted by Jesse Friedman, Google Crisis Response team

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Google Person Finder has been heavily used since the Japan earthquake on March 11, and we’ve received several reports from users who have successfully reconnected with their friends and family. My teammates and I are glad that it’s been useful, and we’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to the project.

Today, there are over 600,000 records in Google Person Finder. As explained on the site, the data has always been publicly available to make it easier to find people you care about. We’ve found, however, that this kind of data is most useful immediately after a crisis and becomes less useful as time passes. Out of respect for our users, we don’t want to publish or keep this information longer than is necessary.

Starting today, Google Person Finder will support an expiry date on each record, as described in the PFIF 1.3 open standard. As part of this change, we are setting an expiry date of May 31, 2011 on all our existing records and deleting archived records from past launches. When you enter a new record in Google Person Finder, you can specify when you want it to expire. It will automatically disappear from Google Person Finder at that time, and it will be gone from our backups within 60 days thereafter. We are also requiring that everyone who uses the Google Person Finder API under our Terms of Service follow this same data retention policy.

At any time before a record expires, you can visit the record and click a button to extend its expiry date. We encourage you to provide an email address when you create a record so that we can send you a notice when the record expires. The notice will contain a link, valid for 3 days, that you can use to restore the record before it is permanently deleted.

We hope that you never experience a disaster; but, if you have been affected by one, we hope that Google Person Finder and the other Google Crisis Response tools have been helpful to you and your loved ones.

Posted by Ka-Ping Yee, Software Engineer, Google.org

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(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day with an animated, interactive doodle on our homepage and events at Google offices around the world. At our headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., we’re holding an environmental fair for Googlers, complete with speakers and contests to strengthen Googlers’ green acumen, and a cookout using—what else—parabolic solar cookers (don’t worry, we’ll compost the leftovers).

Our campus garden in Mountain View

We’ve been carbon neutral since 2007 and—Earth Day or not—we’re always asking ourselves what we can do to make the world greener today than it was yesterday. This week, we launched a new website with many of the questions we’ve been asking over the years that have inspired our environmental initiatives. What can we do to make renewable energy cheaper than coal? How can we run a data center using 50 percent less energy? And what does it take to green our energy supply?

It’s questions like these that led us to install solar panels on our Mountain View campus in 2007—at the time, the largest corporate solar installation in the U.S. They’re also what made us decide to donate to Googlers’ favorite charities based on how often they self-power their commute, whether by bike or by pogo stick. We hope the new website helps you start asking bold questions that lead to innovative solutions to make the world a greener place.

In addition to our new site, we’ve had a busy few weeks continuing our green streak. We doubled down on greening our energy supply with our second power purchase agreement (PPA) in less than a year and made several new investments: at a solar photovoltaic plant in Germany (our first in Europe), and others in the largest wind farm and solar project in the world, bringing our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million. While the investments won’t supply our operations with energy, we believe they make business sense and will spur development and deployment of compelling clean energy technologies.

This Earth Day, we’ll continue to ask ourselves what else we can do to bring us closer to true sustainability. We hope that you, and companies across the world, will be doing the same.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Enegy Czar

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