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Wind Map
- blueski 15y agoBeautifully done. Just discovered you can zoom in by double clicking.
- Edootjuh 15y agoVery cool. It's interesting to see how elevation affects the wind here (http://www.theodora.com/maps/new9/usa_elevation_map.gif http://www.theodora.com/maps/new9/usa_elevation_map.gif), but I'd wish there was a worldwide version. (I'm aware that you need a data source) Should you be interested, here's data from the Netherlands: http://www.knmi.nl/samenw/hydra/cgi-bin/register.cgi http://www.knmi.nl/samenw/hydra/cgi-bin/register.cgi
- lutorm 15y agoBeautiful visualization! It would be interesting to have an underlay showing the topography so one can correlate features in the wind pattern with mountain ranges, etc.
- hoprocker 15y ago+1. Some of the linear disruptions in wind flow suggest the topography, it'd definitely be interesting to correlate changes in elevation w/ the wind patterns.
- nostromo 15y agoGreat idea. You can clearly see how the wind patterns are distorted around the Sierra Nevadas and Rockies. While in the East wind patterns are much more smooth. You could also add color to indicate the temperature of the air.
- crisnoble 15y agoIf you could get at the GIS data sets you would be golden. Anyone know of an easy way to integrate GIS data into web applications?
- gibybo 15y agoI am used to seeing wind markings on aviation maps (e.g. http://www.aviationweather.gov/adds/winds/ http://www.aviationweather.gov/adds/winds/) but it's pretty cool how much clearer this map is. It makes me wish I could see a much larger portion of the world so I could get a better understanding of the currents that are entering/exiting the US.
- th0ma5 15y agobeen wanting to do this myself for like forever. it looks like they are using high level summary data from the NWS ... they also have this amazing thing called MADIS which focuses on micro climate research (and more) ... so in theory you could get a high resolution version of this for san francisco or nyc, and that'd be really great and possibly rather useful too. I think the Weather Underground is a subscriber of MADIS, and their "rapid update" feature has some of this, and also I should mention some of this is collected by ham radio people in their spare time too.
- crazygringo 15y agoThat's amazing. It's so inspiring to see someone can have such a simple idea, execute, and create something not only incredibly intuitive and useful, but beautiful too. It makes you wonder what other things are out there waiting to be done, and what you can do.
- iamwil 15y agoI'm not so sure it's exactly simple to implement. A quick glance at the code, it seems like they had to implement vector field support from scratch.
- malandrew 15y agoI haven't looked at the code and how they implemented vector field support, but couldn't a library like Sylvester have been used? http://sylvester.jcoglan.com/ http://sylvester.jcoglan.com/ Paper.js looks like it could work as well: http://paperjs.org/about/ http://paperjs.org/about/
- jjcm 15y agoReally a stunning presentation of this data. A huge "whoa." moment when it loaded.
- mahyarm 15y agoThey should add Canada, Mexico and the ocean if possible to see where these in and out flows are coming from.
- th0ma5 15y agoor tie it in with the ocean viz from nasa from the other day! unfortunately most of the data i could find for canada was only in the south, and the mexico data was similarly in only the more densely populated areas.
- nextstep 15y agoThis reminds me of the proof that there is always a point on the earth where there is no wind. This is a property of spherical surfaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem
- crazygringo 15y agoAnd some people think mathematicians have no sense of humor!
- cbr 15y agoThere is only a windless spot on earth if you take wind to mean air moving horizontal to the earth's surface. Otherwise imagine that we have wind that points north along the ground, with wind pointing up at the north pole and down at the south pole (and higher up wind comes back south).
- nextstep 15y agoThat's a good point. I think the surface you are describing (that the wind would sweep out) would be a torus. The 2-torus is "combable."
- joejohnson 15y agoThis visualization is incredible but it made my browser freeze for almost a minute :(
- jordanb 15y agoThis is beautiful and a brilliant, intuitive "100,000 feet up" picture of wind movements. But it's not horribly useful if you are interested in wind conditions at a particular place. Trying to figure out if a spot is experiencing 15mph wind vs 10mph is hard, for instance. Compare it to these maps: http://passageweather.com/ http://passageweather.com/ which are not pretty nor are they intuitive but they are useful for someone trying to use the map to get detailed, localized wind condition information. It seems like there should be some kind of middle ground between this wind map and maps like passageweater.com, maps that are intuitive and pretty but also provide detailed, useful information.
- hoprocker 15y agoMaybe using colors instead of shades of gray would be clearer?
- iamwil 15y agoactually, if you click on the map, you can zoom in, and you can see whether a particular spot is experiencing fierce winds or not. I haven't figured out how to zoom out yet though.
- link2009 15y agoNINJA EDIT: There is an 'unzoom' button on the left! I can't figure out how to zoom out either because I don't think they've implemented that functionality. You can also zoom in infinitely...which is strange.
- WALoeIII 15y agohttp://windonthewater.com/ http://windonthewater.com/ (use http://windonthewater.com/i.htm http://windonthewater.com/i.htm on your phone) http://windalert.com/ http://windalert.com/ (iOS app for mobile) NOAA Point Forecasts: ex: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=20.91&lon=-156.45&site=hfo&unit=0&lg=en http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=20.91&lon=-...
- dfc 15y agoIs a 5 mile an hour difference important?
- th0ma5 15y agosome previous visual inspiration possibly for project: (based on lidar data) http://www.datatelling.com/2011/07/29/wind-flow/ http://www.datatelling.com/2011/07/29/wind-flow/ http://www.shiffman.net/itp/classes/nature/week06_s09/flowfield/ http://www.shiffman.net/itp/classes/nature/week06_s09/flowfi... as well as the big nasa ocean viz from the past few days
- spot 15y agopredates both of those by quite a bit: http://nixweb.com/dust/ http://nixweb.com/dust/
- white_raven 15y agoI want this as a screen saver!
- DivisibleByZero 15y agoI was thinking a desktop background version.
- samstave 15y agoI can zoom really far in by double-clicking, but I cant zoom back out. I have to refresh to zoom out. This is BEAUTIFUL. It would be cool to see the different speed ranges reflected by [color of my choice] as well!
- Uchikoma 15y agoBrilliant. On a side node: Anyone else reminded of Deluxe Paint palette cycling animations by this?
- iamwil 15y agoIt's also neat because you can tell where the mountains are. They're the sections where the wind was pretty slow, and then it speeds up and then slows down again. You can see it over the Rocky Mountains.
- krosaen 15y agovery pretty. related: http://windhistory.com http://windhistory.com
- tpurves 15y agoWhere is the wind over the water? Who cares about what the is on land? As a sailor, I find this map frustrating and upsetting for showing me beautiful wind everywhere I can't sail a boat.
- jeremyarussell 15y agoI got lost for quite awhile looking at all the wind and how it moves around the area I'm pretty sure is my mountainous home. Kudos to the maker(s).
- Slie 15y agoI love this i think it is really cool. Where is Alaska and the rest of the united states?
- afterburner 15y agoWind power, baby.
- uvdiv 15y agoNot actually a good representation for wind energy potential, because wind power is cubic in wind speed (v^2 for kinetic energy per unit volume, times v^1 for volume/(cross sectional area * unit time)). So energy potential is concentrated in the "long tail", infrequent high winds. (E.g. 30 mph is 8x more powerful than 15 mph, 27x more than 10 mph). The distribution looks much more "uneven" -- both in space (clustered) and time (fluctuating) -- than a linear-in-windspeed map shows. Off topic: if anyone's looking for a slightly gigantic weather history dataset ("oodles of terabytes"), look at [1]. It has accumulated "a few thousand" weather stations, at 5 minute intervals, going back "a few" years (I forget the numbers). [1] http://madis.noaa.gov/ http://madis.noaa.gov/
- peter_l_downs 15y agoHey, thanks for that weather dataset link. I had tried to find something similar a couple of months ago and completely failed — somehow, I missed this site entirely.
- cshimmin 15y agoInteresting point. Of course a wind-powered device cannot extract all of the power of the wind; the power goes more like v^2 times (delta)v, where the delta is basically how effectively the device can slow the wind. Of course, one might expect this term might be proportional to the original windspeed, so it still goes roughly as v^3. For a related analysis, see Betz' Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz_law
- scblock 15y agoIt's easy enough to convert something like that to energy potential, but when determining whether a site has good potential for wind energy development we really do tend to think of the wind in terms of speed (in m/s) and not energy density. Depending on the capture technology (even specific wind turbine models using a certain technology) and project arrangement the variation even at a single location is very high. And this is a beautiful visualization of the flow.
- doubtfully 15y ago
- pragmatic 15y agoA nice addition might be the current locations of wind farms (if that data is accessible someplace).
- toomuchtodo 15y agoHave already been working on an app for this (just for lulz); haven't had time to finish it yet. I pull from public DOE data regarding generation locations.
- crisnoble 15y agoI wish they would make this open source. It is beautiful.
- dgudkov 15y agoLooks beautiful but barely usable. Winds have different speed and direction at different altitudes.
- kfury 15y agoThis. The site should clearly state whether they're showing 1000ft prevailing winds, jetstream-level currents (around 30,000 feet) or more surface-level effects. All the people talking about power generation from this data should be aware that the only wind that matters there is below 1,000 ft (in many cases, far below 1,000 ft.)
- crazygringo 15y ago"Surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database."
- mbostock 15y agoThis appears to be an animated form of line integral convolution. Cabral and Leedom paper's from SIGGRAPH '93, Imaging Vector Fields Using Line Integral Convolution (PDF): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115.1636&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115...
- datatelling 15y agoThis is great, Mike - thanks for sharing the doc.
- xbryanx 15y agoOdd that they didn't label any of the cities in the places that seem to have the greatest generation potential.
- MyNewAccount 15y agobeautiful, but not sure how useful it is?
- dfj225 15y agoThis would be even better if it could display change over time. To support, for example, animate the change in wind direction for the past week.
- ww520 15y agoWow that's cool. Where do you get the wind data?
- brownbat 15y agoMy favorite wind potential graph, NPR's "Visualizing the U.S. Electric Grid" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109973... Makes offshore look pretty good.
- brownbat 15y agoSo... I want this for all of the world, extrapolated over the oceans.
- prbuckley 15y agoThis would be even cooler if you could display wind speeds at different elevations above the ground. I am guessing that at a certain elevation you have higher winds that kites might be able to capture energy from.
- nix 15y agoThey are using a bad dataset. Some of the discontinuities you see are administrative boundaries between National Weather Service forecast offices. http://nixweb.com/dust/ http://nixweb.com/dust/ is my version, for the SF Bay Area only. It was 15 years ago so pardon my Java applet.
- sidwyn 15y agoLooks a lot like a chunk of hair. Very neat implementation!
- voodoochilo 15y agogreat stuff, but my cputemp is in the clouds
- kevinslin8 15y agoits been said by others but this is an incredible visualization of a massive amount of data in a beautiful and intuitive medium. it'll be interesting to have this for other large datasets eg. real time web usage...
- paraschopra 15y agoI want color!
- BHSPitMonkey 15y agoNever before has a piece of software made me wish for a hurricane to ravage my country simply out of curiosity.
- run4yourlives 15y agoThis is beautiful, but I find it lacking because of the focus on the US mainland exclusively. It would be nice to see North America as a whole along with a good part of the Pacific and Atlantic, because these areas have a massive effect on wind patterns. For example, the wind over the Chicago is travelling "backwards" for no apparent reason. This is most likely due to this being the "backward half" of a cyclonic system centred over Canada. The other thing that struck me is the effect the Southwest desert has on wind patterns over all... just, wow.
- adlep 15y agoThis will be a great tool for paragliders. I will post this on paraglidingforums Thanks for the link.