Synthesizing thunder using JavaScript

http://blog.kaistale.com/?p=1340

by kabla • 12 years ago

60 11 12 years ago

blog.kaistale.com

Sounds pretty real to me and the theory behind it is written up very nicely. I wonder: would this work the other way round? Take a (stereo) recording of thunder and an exact time measurement between the flash and the first sound and plot the flash from that. If that worked, you wouldn't need a huge high speed camera mounted on a truck in order to record how a flash propagates...

al2o3cr• 12 years ago

The biggest gotcha with a time-based measurement of the thunder is the variability of the speed of sound with temperature - about 0.6 m/s per degree Celsius. Given that thunderstorms tend to involve pretty significant temperature shifts, the temperature can vary significantly along the path length.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

Besides issues like temperature, you'd need to to control for interference from geographic features like hills and valleys. It might work in wide open flat spaces like the prairies of the American mid-west.

If you're interested in this, there was a very good program on PBS's science show Nova a month or two back, called 'the edge of space' or something similar, which involved photography of lightning at altitude and later from the space station, resulting in confirmation that lightning interacts with the upper atmosphere as well as the ground.

jacobparker• 12 years ago

Andrew Glassner has written about this a lot http://www.glassner.com/computer-graphics/graphics-research/...

(See his references section)

kabla• 12 years ago

Great, thanks for this, I'll have to check those out when I'm at a computer with access.

reidrac2• 12 years ago

It killed Chrome and made my laptop irresponsible until I managed to close the page. Something in the thunder generation is bringing my system to its knees.

I'm not complaining about the page or anything, but I'm really surprised how unreliable and fragile are web browsers to pages with javascript. It's using a web worker, but other than that I can't see anything special.

Fragment• 12 years ago

Well, in some places it's not a great idea to use your computer in an electrical storm if it's connected to a mains outlet.

Sounds like you were lucky.

joshuacc• 12 years ago

"irresponsible" -> "unresponsive"

artjumble• 12 years ago

We don't know that was the intention. Perhaps the laptop decided to connect to the internet without a firewall.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

It killed Chrome and made my laptop irresponsible

I know you meant unresponsive, but this conjured up a delightful image of your laptop jumping around the room snapping its lid at people like a set of autonomous false teeth.

reidrac2• 12 years ago

Well, that would be amusing. English is my third language and sometimes I trust too much in the spell checker suggestions.

My graphologies ;)

Synthesizing thunder using JavaScript

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