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Bay Area Storm Watch
- jychang 12y agoIt took me a few mins to realize that this page is interactive. Press the "Earth" button to set time/date, move to current location, height of wind currents, overlay, etc.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoIt appears to be an interactive control for changing your laptop's fan speed.
- cfontes 12y agoThat comment belongs to reddit with a very high karma count. I LOLed here.
- jrockway 12y agoWeb 2.0: making your top-of-the-line i7 desktop feel slower than an 80s mainframe. But at least you don't have to declare types on the variables! Such productivity!
- sp332 12y agoWeb 2.0: making the computer work so the programmer doesn't have to. You get a beautiful, interactive visualization with near-real-time data that runs on every platform (even my phone!) with a single codebase.
- fludlight 12y agoDr. Jeff Masters adds some color to this data on his blog[1]. Also note the second vortex off the Canadian coast[2]. [1] http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2877 http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?en... [2] http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-128.81,45.74,1154 http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/l...
- pwarner 12y agoI don't know why people are so worried about the lack of snow at this point. There is plenty of room in the reservoirs for rain at this point. Maybe later in the season the snow will become important, but at this point I think CA can store lots of liquid water Some reservoirs can't be filled this early as the need to leave space for flood control, but the big ones have so much extra room I imagine they can store every drop.
- mc32 12y agoIt's because most of the rainwater will end up back in the sea via sewers, rivers, etc. Snow becomes snowmelt --which happens slowly so it does not become runoff but filters into aquifers, reservoirs, etc.
- thaumaturgy 12y agoI don't think it works that way. A few of the large California reservoirs, like the San Luis Reservoir and Lake Berryessa, get their water from storm runoff in mountains that don't typically accumulate much snow, but a large amount of the water storage in California comes from Sierra or Trinity snowpack. Unfortunately, a lot of California storm drainage is designed to move the water to the ocean as quickly as possible, to prevent flooding. I think most of the rainfall in the Bay Area that doesn't soak into the ground will find its way to the delta or to the Bay rather than a reservoir. Think of it this way: cumulative snowpack is a massive year-round reservoir in California. See e.g. http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article3505269.html http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article3505269....
- sp332 12y agoHere are the reservoir levels. http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...
- aw3c2 12y agoaaaargh those color schemes in [1] are horrible!
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- kylek 12y agoLove this visualization. Ben usually references it every day on https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers
- Animats 12y agoVery pretty. But, despite what the web site shows, Silicon Valley is currently at 63F/clear/calm. The site shows wind speeds of 36km/h. Not sure where they get their wind data, but it's clearly low resolution.
- kposehn 12y agoIt's referring to a higher altitude than the surface.
- epa 12y agoThe Valley may be calm but winds are picking up fast in the city. Either way -- the visuals are beautiful on this page.
- rosser 12y ago"Global warming isn't real because I was cold today! Also great news: World hunger is over because I just ate." — Stephen Colbert
- nosefrog 12y agoThis doesn't have anything to do with the commenter above: they're looking at the wind speed for their area, not the wind in alaska. If the wind speed on the site is radically different from the speed outside their window, then coming to the conclusion that the site's wind data is low resolution is perfectly valid.
- Animats 12y agoRight. Here's Bay Area data based on wind speeds at 20 locations, including all the airports. http://www.met.sjsu.edu/cgi-bin/wind/windbin.cgi http://www.met.sjsu.edu/cgi-bin/wind/windbin.cgi There's even a streaklines display, as in this article, although it's an old Java applet.
- Plough_Jogger 12y agoWhat is your current altitude?
- suyash 12y agoLook very nice on Mobile Safari, gestures and visualization is awesome!
- nXqd 12y agothis looks fantastic.
- daleharvey 12y agoI would love to see someone use this visualisation as the background to a "the weather in X is" mobile weather app
- vertoc 12y agoFlying from LAX to SEA tomorrow evening... hope I'm not stranded at the airport :(
- jedberg 12y agoIf you manage to leave, that's going to be one hell of a takeoff.
- taurath 12y agoCancelled my flight from SEA to SFO, which was supposed to land at 9AM Thursday. Pretty sure whether indefinite delays or cancellation I wasn't gonna get on that plane.
- rconti 12y agoDoing the opposite; SFO to SEA, but on Friday afternoon. Should be no problem, but you never know with SFO. I've personally had good luck with that airport but delays seem SO common.
- dmckeon 12y agoNo beautiful graphics, but the stacked graphs and draggable index line seem information rich: http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Sunnyvale.html http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Sunnyvale.html
- tonymillion 12y agoThats not a storm, this is a storm: http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-8.13,51.46,1154 http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/l...
- thomyorkie 12y agoOr this: http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-3.97,139.48,1154 http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/l...
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- davidw 12y agoI recall visiting my uncle in Arizona for Thanksgiving one year. In the afternoon, it rained maybe one centimeter. It was the first thing on the evening news.
- DanielBMarkham 12y agoFirst time I was in California, it was September. I get off the plane and the recruiter picks me up in a convertible. "See that cloud?" he points. "Yep" "That's the first cloud I've seen in almost three months" I found that a strange thing to say. A couple of months later, I get off work and go back to the apartment. I'm watching Jeoprady and they do one of these "Action News Storm Team 7" break-ins. They cut to the meterologist who's pointing out breaking news on the triple doplar jetstream radar or whatnot. It's rain. Looks like a tiny shower, maybe 500 yards across. The guy says "Looks like this storm will be headed across I5 very soon, so motorist should be extremely cautious"
- LarryMade2 12y agoa small snow storm will debilitate the valley and bay area... stuff like that just doesn't happen too often here. On the i5 rain the threat is real on first rains as the roads have trace oil that will wash off and cars will shed months of carwash soap residue.
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- jschulenklopper 12y agoCool (eh, hot?) and impressive visualization! Don't know which was first, but it reminded me of the wind map from hint.fm, originating from 2012: http://hint.fm/wind/ http://hint.fm/wind/ . That one presents a nice black/white impression of wind conditions in the USA, whereas this visualization from Cameron displays a broad range of weather conditions around the globe with multiple visualization styles. Impressive what's possible with D3... [Edit: oh, hint.fm was mentioned as inspiration on the GitHub page https://github.com/cambecc/earth. https://github.com/cambecc/earth.]
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- dmix 12y agoWhat does any of that have to do with the bay area? Clearly they have different infrastructure. And degrees of bad weather.
- YokoZar 12y agoDrainage and sewage make all the difference in turning monsoon weather into "just rain".
- webkike 12y agoJust because it's worse somewhere doesn't mean it's not bad somewhere else
- gdubs 12y agoRain got heavy about an hour ago in Los Altos and the water started rising pretty quickly. I'd keep an eye on this one today.
- jnem 12y agoI think, perhaps, the reason its not "as bad" is precisely because of the preparations and warnings.
- sixothree 12y agoWhere do people in the bay area generally get their news?
- fluxsauce 12y agoGot a few options. http://www.sfgate.com/ http://www.sfgate.com/ http://www.insidebayarea.com/ http://www.insidebayarea.com/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/ http://www.kqed.org/ http://www.kqed.org/ http://abc7news.com/ http://abc7news.com/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/ http://www.nbcbayarea.com/ http://www.nbcbayarea.com/
- nogridbag 12y agoLooks like the storm affected archive.org's datacenter: https://twitter.com/internetarchive https://twitter.com/internetarchive