In the past decade, two interactive maps have changed the way we see the weather.
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg created “wind map,” which they describe as a personal art project, ten years ago. Image courtesy of (hint.fm) / Point B. Studio.
Excerpt from this story from Earth Island Journal:
Before they released “wind map,” which they describe as “a personal art project,” a decade ago, weather maps mostly hosted a mix of symbols to show wind speed and direction — barbs that look like notched feathers, triangle vectors running along contours, little white glyphs that float on a sea of color. Of course, the animated streamlets Viégas and Wattenberg chanced upon on their screen that day were nothing new — they’d long been the plaything of scientists attempting to model what happens when a tracer is dropped into a fluid already in motion. According to Mathew Barlow, a climate scientist at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, they’d just made them better. What’s more, the designers chose not to “obfuscate the code,” as Viégas has said, paving the way for those who might copy it and also draw from the same free wind data their site uses to show near real-time wind patterns over the United States.
A long way from Halley’s captain’s logbooks and his scrawled notes, the ever-changing numbers that fuel their “wind map” come from an array of technologies varying in sophistication. From weather satellites in orbit 22,000 miles above the equator to weather balloons launched simultaneously twice daily around the United States to a continent’s worth of wind anemometers all-a-spin. Don’t forget the supercomputers run by the National Weather Service that produce gridded forecast models of current and expected wind conditions up to fourteen days in advance.
Cameron Beccario’s map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions can take a variety of forms and show an ever-expanding number of atmospheric and oceanic variables. Map by Cameron Beccario (earth.nullschool.net) / Point B. Studio.
