Blue Marble Next Generation
WMS Time Navigation in worldKit
Pretty pictures, optimism and some technical stuff (what do you mean?)

Use the slider to navigate through the year. Press "p" to Play, "s" to Stop, "r" to Rewind (you may need to click the map first)

What? Kilimanjaro is melting and (understatement) the world changes all the time. We need tools to get to grips with spatial change.

Blue Marble Next Generation features 500m Resolution Monthly Global Images. OnEarth makes the entire data set available in an optimized WMS. worldKit already supports time navigation through GeoRSS. An experimental hack in worldKit enables time based navigation through these WMS layers.

There is a little used feature of the WMS Spec, to specify time in queries. This shows excellent forethought at the OGC. Mapserver has some WMS Time Support, as well as MapBuilder (WMS Time Series with MapBuilder (PPT)). While the Blue Marble set at OnEarth does not explicitly use this feature, the daily composites of MODIS Aqua and Terra do, so there's potential there for deeper support of the spec.