Posts Tagged ‘Visualisation’

Global wind patterns, visualised

Earth is an interactive web-based visualisation of global wind conditions, based on readings and supercomputer forecasts of current and future weather conditions. Not only does it render this data live within the browser; it also allows for the interactive display of multiple height readings, overlays, and cartographic projection types.

Screen Shot 2013-12-20 at 10.46.13

By Cameron Beccario, it’s a staggering example of the insights that interactive visualisation can give. What’s more, the code used for the data analysis and visualisation is all available on Github.

ocean surface currents visualised over two years, using a NASA/JPL computational model https://t.co/GDEZJ8P5


a beautiful interactive map of wind flow across the USA http://t.co/OjSIE9rA (via @_jbag @sebemina)


windswept (2012), a wind-driven kinetic façade indicating the direction of windflow over the surface of a building http://t.co/76hs5PHt


david bowen, “tele-present water”, uses NOAA wave data for an installation that is profound in its simplicity http://t.co/uAEW3Wsm


Snape Maltings night report

We’re twelve hours into Variable 4 Snape Maltings and layering up for nighttime under the Suffolk sky. Thanks to everybody who caught the coach to join us this afternoon — after a long period of grey skies, the sun eventually broke through to herald its departure.

Remote viewers can listen to our audio stream, and view a fantastic ongoing timelapse video of the site courtesy of the endlessly skilled Louis Mustill.

Weatherspark

In preparation for next month’s Faster Than Sound, we’ve been doing some analysis of the local area’s weather data from past years, to gain some insight into what the conditions are likely to be on the day. The gratifying part of this is producing graphical visualisations of weather patterns, which can often be aesthetically beautiful as well as useful for understanding underlying structure.

Here are a couple from last year’s research at Dungeness, representing the distribution of wind direction over a month:

winddir

winddir-may09

In looking into online approaches, we came across Weatherspark, which is an incredibly full-featured tool to look into current and historical meteorological trends around the world. It includes data from a weather station not too far from Aldeburgh, and can be filtered by numerous attributes: wind speed and direction, sun hours, temperature, dew point, humidity, precipitation, and more.

Screen shot 2011-04-28 at 21.27.03

It allows data from different stations to also be compared, and – in a really nice feature – generates written weather forecasts for any given day. Check it out for May 28th.

Weather data #3: Wind direction through May 2009

Thanks once again to the impressive archival of Romney Marsh Weather, here’s a third plot of wind direction data: this time, on a 5-minutely basis, through the entirety of May 2009.

winddir-may09

All of these plots have been created with the invaluable R toolkit, with ggplot2 and circstats for polar plots.

Weather data #2: Wind direction

As a followup to our earlier post on weather data from Romney Marsh, here’s a quick circle plot of the wind direction over the same time period (30 April – 6 May 2010).

It seems to tally pretty closely with the Met Office commentary on southern wind patterns: prevailing south-westerlies from the passing Atlantic depressions, alongside seasonal winds from the north-east due to high pressure over Scandinavia.

Romney Marsh Wind Direction, w/e 6 May 2010

Romney Marsh Wind Direction, w/e 6 May 2010.
Data: Romney Marsh Weather

Weather data