A Beautiful, Windy Map

I really enjoy visualizations on the computer.  This one puts me over the top.

Visit the website:  http://earth.nullschool.net/  and sit back and watch.

Wind patterns are animated and displayed on the globe.

How do we verify the source?  That’s always important.  There’s no easily apparent source or author until you click on the “earth” title in the bottom left corner of the screen.  Details on the source appear there.  I got excited and changed the URL to mars.nullschool.net but nothing appeared.  A bit of disappointment.

But you can play with this screen.  Click and hold your mouse and take it for a spin.

When you stop, you’ll see the vector map for a second.

And then it gets populated with the wind visualization.

Given the big storm that we’re supposed to get this weekend, this could be an interesting watch.

For the classroom, I’m seeing the following:

• colours show intensity;
• density show speed;
• winds faster over water than land.

I wish I’d paid more attention in Geography and Science classes!

In addition to spinning, you can also zoom in to a location – in my case, the Great Lakes.

Well, that looks good enough for a dog walk!  Gotta go.

Take some time to play and explore.  If you have additional ideas or explorations, share them below.

Related articles

• Real-time global wind map (motls.blogspot.com)
• Earth Wind Map turns raw weather data into neon art (theverge.com)
• Hypnotically beautiful real-time wind map of Earth created by supercomputers (treehugger.com)
• Take a look at the world’s wind currents with these Wind Maps (technoblimp.com)

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