Martin Wattenberg & Fernanda Viegas have just announced their latest project, an impressive interactive visualization of windflow across the United States.
Surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database. (For those of you chasing top wind speed, note that maximum speed may occur over lakes or just offshore.)
These are 1-hour forecasts, downloaded once per hour. So what you’re seeing is close to live data. We’d be interested in displaying data for the entire earth; if you know of a source of detailed live wind data for the entire globe, please let us know.
The map is interactive so that you can zoom into detailed areas of interest. Also there are flyover tips charting exact wind speeds at lat/long positions. The resolution of the detail seems fairly sparse so there’s little point in zooming in more than 2 or 3 times, but it’s a beautiful visualization. To add to the impressiveness of it, it’s not flash: It’s all JavaScript & HTML5.
via Wind Map.
