A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

https://earth.nullschool.net/

by fmariluis • 10 years ago

438 48 10 years ago

earth.nullschool.net

jenhsun• 10 years ago

Thanks, but I prefer this https://www.windyty.com/

dandelany4• 10 years ago

Credit where credit is due: Nullschool is a lot older than WindyTy, and WindyTy is a fork of Cameron (Nullschool)'s code.

sccxy• 10 years ago

Windyty got API also: http://api.windyty.com/

hayd• 10 years ago

Do/will they charge for that? I have a few ideas for that.

jcoffland2• 10 years ago

The interface on windyty.com is better. It does not have the problem of filling up your browser's history with every move you make. I would like to be able to see the color scale key with out also having to open the full control panel.

pmarreck• 10 years ago

Every new view should get a URL. That makes every view linkable. People who do not do this are actually violating the spirit of the HTML/URL specs. The fact that you see your browser history as polluted is an implementation detail that could be rectified by simply collapsing all consecutive URL's from the same domain over N url's into a hierarchical dropdown.

joeyspn• 10 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. This is so cool for kitesurfing and sailing. I didn't know any of these services and windyty looks really nice. Specially I like that you can zoom-in much more than in OP's globe....

cryptoz• 10 years ago

It's especially interesting to watch Hermine travel up the US east coast right now. NHC forecast track here for the next 5 days: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graphics_at4.shtml?5-daynl#contents

Right now is especially fascinating because the Euro and GFS models have recently begun to agree on the storm re-forming into a hurricane in a couple of days off the New Jersey coast. It's a fascinating time to watch wind patterns in the US right now!

Edit: Another really interesting tool is the Total Precipitable Water product: http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mimic-tpw/natl/main.ht...

dhimes2• 10 years ago

I have found the Euro model quite good for the Northeast US.

jamesblonde• 10 years ago

Ecmwf are the best medium term forecasts, 3-7 days.

zaroth• 10 years ago

This will be almost the only rain we've seen all summer. Here's hoping for hurricanes.

isalmon• 10 years ago

Does anybody know what this is? https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/ort...

It shows over 300F in the middle of it.

sosborn• 10 years ago

It is Hurricane Lester near Hawaiʻi. Wondering what happened to create that temperature error.

jcoffland2• 10 years ago

A storm. Look at the wave height. Also appears to be moving. It likely won't be there later.

Oh and that's wind speed not temp. In K/h.

Edit: actually the degrees you are seeing is the wind direction.

Symbiote3• 10 years ago

Here's a link with a time, so it continues to work: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/09/02/1500Z/wind/surface/...

elihu2• 10 years ago

I think the 310' is the direction, not temperature. Unless you're seeing something different than I am.

dsp1234• 10 years ago

  9.98° N, 149.27° W
  360° @ 88 km/h

Means:

The location of this data point on the earth's surface is 9.8 degrees North Latitude, 149.27 degrees West longitude[0]. Wind direction is 360 azimuth degrees(meaning it's coming from straight north at that point sampled[1]) at a speed of 88 km/h.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_direction

SubZero• 10 years ago

Its degrees as a geometrical measurement, not temperature. Its showing the course/angle of the wind at that location.

Symbiote3• 10 years ago

This is fantastic!

Be sure to click the menu, and browse the chemical pollution or particulate data, and the alternative projections. XKCD fans will be pleased :-D

mrb• 10 years ago

I used this site to check wind conditions during the 2015 Tianjin explosions. I was 90 miles away (Beijing) and was considering leaving the country had wind been blowing in the wrong direction. At the time the risk of the hazardous chemicals released by the explosions was completely unknown, so wind conditions were the only objective piece of information I could base my decision on. Fortunately the wind was blowing north/east.

cossatot2• 10 years ago

I forked this and put plate tectonic velocity vectors (in an earth-centered, earth-fixed coordinate system) in place of wind vectors but didn't have the .js knowledge or time to fix all the annotations and menu stuff. I'm hoping to get to that this fall (but I've been saying that for a year or two...):

http://earth-analysis.com/vels/public/

elihu2• 10 years ago

That's a very good idea. Well done.

sevenless• 10 years ago

Nice! Lucky the annotations aren't accurate, I wouldn't like to have 68mph plate tectonics... :)

Interesting that there seem to be the plate tectonic versions of cyclones, like off Baja California.

Also, is the absence of data at the poles due to a coordinate system limitation?

cossatot2• 10 years ago

The velocities are in mm/yr. 68 mph plate tectonics would definitely be terrifying; that's an order of magnitude faster than faults move during an earthquake.

There are two phenomena that look cyclonic.

The larger ones have to do with motion on a sphere: Euler showed that any velocity vector on a sphere can be represented as a rotation about a point (called an Euler pole); tectonic plates move basically rigidly, so the whole things rotate around a point. When that point is very close to (or within) the plate, the rotation is quite visible. You can see this in the Antarctic plate, halfway between Antarctica and Madagascar.

The second is an artifact of the vector visualization that Beccario used. The atmosphere is a continuum, so particles move smoothly between one location and another (more or less). But tectonic plates have rigid boundaries, and dive under each other or slide rigidly past one another. But the visualization algorithm doesn't know about these boundaries, so it creates particle paths that cross the boundaries and appear to swirl around. This probably happens to some degree in the mantle below the plates, but not really at the surface, with minor exceptions that I won't get into now unless people really want to nerd out on microplate rotation.

I'm not sure about the data gap at the poles. That's probably a real gap in the dataset I used; I haven't looked into it.

huangc10• 10 years ago

this is amazing! so trippy. You can really track the two storms (US East Coast and right of Hawaii). The eye of the storm is relatively calm at 0-6 km/hr.

noiv• 10 years ago

Similar, but Arctic only: http://www.arctic.io/#simulation Changing dates and hours with a slider is quite informative.

dcgoss• 10 years ago

Very impressed at how well this works on mobile!

anodari• 10 years ago

Another is Ventusky http://www.ventusky.com/

happyslobro• 10 years ago

Whoa, check this out, 121 KM/h winds over the Antarctic Peninsula: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/ort...

It doesn't look like the other storms, in Hawaii and Florida. I wonder if these are normal conditions for that ridge?

imaginenore• 10 years ago

109 right next to Hawaii.

Symbiote3• 10 years ago

I think it's called a katabatic wind, see the bottom of http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~kpt/terraquest/va/science/climate/c...

neptunespear• 10 years ago

If you use 500mbar visualizations, you can visualize the "reverse" weather pattern from last summer, with the wonky jet stream, high pressure baking the Pacific Northwest, and cool weather in the midwest and on the East Coast: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2015/07/03/1800Z/wind/isobaric...

Another example from July 2014: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/07/14/1500Z/wind/isobaric...

Conversely, you can see how the "heat dome" of this summer smothered almost the entirety of the contiguous United States, except for the West Coast in general and the Pacific Northwest in particular: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/07/22/1500Z/wind/isobaric...

Keyframe• 10 years ago

That's really cool, but does it really have to reload data on every viewport move/change?

I use somewhat similar app for android made by Croatian Ministry of Maritime Affairs, Transport and Infrastructure https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hr.mppi.nis&ah... There's also iOS version https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nautical-info-service-croati...

Really handy when you're out there.

dandelany4• 10 years ago

It doesn't reload data - it just stops the particle system advection and restarts it when you're done moving.

And yes, this is pretty necessary (at least it's quite hard to work around). To maintain the same view during viewport movement, it would have to keep track of all the particle trails in lat/long space and re-project them all to the new view. But this is implemented in canvas, so the trails (ie. particle histories) are likely not stored in their entirety - more likely, the system keeps track of only the particle's current position, and the trails are accomplished by drawing new line segments over the old on each frame. Yes, it would be technically possible to keep track of each particle's full history, and to re-project them all during interaction, but it would be pretty slow.

(I didn't make this, but I've written a very similar particle system in canvas and ran into similar issues)

bschwindHN• 10 years ago

I imagine you could accomplish the trails with some triangle strips in WebGL and let the GPU do the heavy lifting. I wonder if that would perform any better.

edpichler• 10 years ago

This is also good https://www.windyty.com

foota• 10 years ago

Anyone know what the 100km/h ridge of high speed wind over Antarctica is from?

dandelany4• 10 years ago

If you're interested in playing with this visualization technique (particle advection in vector fields) outside the context of geospatial applications - I built this tool called "Vector Toy" which allows you to visualize any given (2D) vector field this way: http://dandelany.github.io/vector-toy/ - note that the functions on the right side are editable.

jerdavis• 10 years ago

Way to go Cambec!

cambecc• 10 years ago

thanks!

323454• 10 years ago

I love the options for different projections.

methehack• 10 years ago

This is cool! I would love to see a similar global car traffic visualization. I suppose that data is much harder to come by.

Rexxar• 10 years ago

Very nice but strangely it's becoming slower on Firefox when I'm moving the mouse cursor around.

sunstone• 10 years ago

This is very cool but, wow it takes a lot of cpu cycles. My desktop tripped out after about 5 minutes.

navyad• 10 years ago

Awesome.

A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

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