Ooh - a new toy from NASA: Earth Now app for iPhones

It's a 3D model of climatic conditions around the entire planet.

As NASA describe it:

NASA's Earth Now is an application that visualizes recent global climate data from Earth Science satellites, including surface air temperature, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and water vapor as well as gravity and sea level variations.

Data sets are visually described using "false color" maps. Color-coded legends are provided to indicate relative strength or weakness of an environmental condition. The resulting 3D model of the Earth may be rotated by a single finger stroke, and may also be zoomed in or out by pinching 2 fingers.

It was developed by the Earth Science Communications and Visualization Technology Applications and Development Teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with support from NASA Headquarters.

Available on iTunes. And it's free.

UPDATE 22/03/2012: One of the people I follow on Twitter is Doug Ellison of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Doug is a visualisation producer and has confirmed for me that he was part of the team that designed Earth Now.