My brother-in-law works for NOAA and has had some involvement in their Science On A Sphere project. This is a high-dollar, permanent-installation system that uses multiple video projectors to paint terrestrial data on a large sphere suspended in the center of a viewing room. Plate tectonics, climate data, ocean currents, pollution, whatever - you can view it and animate it with this system. They’ve sold a bunch of them to museums around the world; I’ve seen a demo at their facility in Boulder, Colorado, and it’s pretty cool.
He recently told me that NOAA now offers the SoS Explorer, a free download. In order to be able to animate with sufficient speed, they can’t stream the data like Google Earth does, so a large number of datasets are bundled with the download - which means that in order to keep the download size reasonable, the resolution is somewhat limited. But if you’re like me, you’ll still find it fascinating. You can animate ocean currents, polar ice cap freeze/thaw cycles, pollution maps, satellite maps, on and on. Seems like exactly the sort of thing that a lot of Dopers might be interested in, so there ya go. Enjoy.