We live in an age where the global pool of information is increasing exponentially. Scientific publications, remote sensing data, photographs, phone-calls, online videos, blogs — all of these things and more make for an ever-increasing flood of information available to anyone with a network connection. Unfortunately, making sense of all of that data is a daunting task, whether you're a three-letter government organization with an army of analysts or just a regular GeekDad heading out to the park with the kids.
Thankfully, there are plenty of people out there working hard to wrestle all of that data into a form that is readily meaningful. The case in point for today is the wind visualization tool created by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of Google's "Big Picture" research group:
Wind visualization from hint.fm/wind/index.html (screenshot from April 13)
The two researchers have created on online app that takes publicly-available windspeed data for the US and creates an animated visualization overlaid on a map. That may not sound like much, but trust me — the results are spectacular. The screenshot above really doesn't do justice to the fully animated version, so I encourage you to head over to the site to see it in action.
If you're a weather weenie, you already know that there are plenty of other great meteorological sites on the internet. I'm particularly fond of the near-realtime radar weather sites such as the US National Weather Service or the Environment Canada site. If you've got another good recommendation, jump into the comments section below and share…
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