Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Animated Wind Maps


Animated wind maps have become very popular over the last few years. Earth: and Windy are just two examples of interactive maps which use weather data from the Global Forecast System to create real-time animated maps of global wind conditions.

US Wind Patterns is another interesting example of an animated wind map. However US Wind Patterns uses historical weather data to visualize the last 72 hours of wind activity in the United States. The map shows the wind direction, speed and temperature measurements from 1200 weather stations on top of an interactive map. Press play and you can watch the changing strength and direction of the wind over the last three days as the map animates through the wind data hour by hour.

US Wind Patterns was made with PhiloGL, a WebGL library for creating data visualizations. The library's demo page includes a number of other map visualizations, including this interesting 3D globe of World Temperature Changes 1880-2011.

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