Site of the week: Earth Wind Map

Take a large, spinning, spheroid object with an atmosphere (like the earth), add some heating from a nearby star (like our sun), and the atmosphere of the spheroid will do some some pretty interesting things.

Take a look at this amazing website that shows the almost-live (updated every 3 hours) animated movement of our atmosphere around the planet. French scientist Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis would have been proud! Perhaps you’ve heard of the Coriolis Effect? Now you can watch Coriolis do its thing!

Once you arrive at the Earth Wind Map, play with it! Use your mouse to move the earth to a different position; the mouse scroll-wheel (or Apple double-finger swipe) zooms the planet in or out. Click on “earth” in the lower-left corner to customize the view and dataset.

You can choose the altitude of the winds you want to display. The choices range from the surface (Sfc) up to 10hPa (10 hectoPascals or roughly 87,000 feet). You can also overlay world-wide temperature, precipitation, cloud moisture or sea-level pressure data. Simply amazing.

Earth Wind Map was created by Cameron Beccario. Cameron maintains a Facebook page where you’ll find updates and comments about the project.