Saturday, December 21, 2013

Model Predictions of World Winds

This shows numerical wind predictions from the same programs used by the NWS. You can zoom, click and drag, or click on a point to get Lat-Lon, speed, and direction. You can also click on the word Earth, to get other options, ie look at the winds aloft (500 mb), or change to a Mercator projection etc. Really nice work from Cameron Beccario. The original source is earth.nullschool.net
This concept and an implementation of it has been around for many years. It was originally an art project and was more stylized than realistic, but now it is a working tool that much helps us understand the winds of the world.



4 comments:

Mehmet said...

This is pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing. Are these real time or for a given time of the year? Is it possible to play thoroughout the year so that we can see the monsoon winds at different times for example?
Thanks

David Burch said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mehmet said...

Thanks for the youtube animation. That's what I was asking for. I will try to take snapshots along the year and create a video. Let's whether I can remember to do it or not. Thanks

David Burch said...

These are model data, not real winds, but the models are good. ie these are predictions for a few days, then updated every hour or so. You might check with NCEP to see if they have any archived data online. we do discuss access to old data from NCDC in our text book. You could also capture good examples and save them. we will try to start an example with the monsoons. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngls4lT6Hhs for another wind pattern.