Wind Visualization Over Time
This repository describes a method to visualize winds over long periods of time.
The demo shows 12 days of wind data. The brighter the color - the higher was the speed in that area. The darker the color - the slower the speed.
The landmass was not intentionally rendered in this visualization. Winds velocities are lower over land and that reveals us the "map" in the background.
The image above has poor quality (to ensure that this repository loads faster). To see a high resolution video for a longer period of time please go here:
The method
In a single day we can "capture" wind by recording its velocity vector. If we record these vectors in every point on the Earth, we'd get nothing else but a vector field.
One way to visualize a vector field is to use streamlines. We drop thousands particles onto the vector field, and trace their movement. There are many ways to draw traces "nicely" and one of such ways was implemented in anvaka/streamlines library.
Here is how a single snapshot of streamlines look like:
click on the image to see high resolution version - you will notice individual traces
Now that we have a single snapshot we can collect multiple snapshots day by date, and concatenate them into single video.
The data
The data comes from https://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/data/gfsanl/ - I downloaded every grib file for the year 2018, and extracted vector fields for winds at the height of 10 meters.
Along the way I wrote a few tools to extract data
and turn it into images (see the code folder ).
Unfortunately there are 10-20 days missing from this source. I couldn't find an alternative, but it was not critical for my exploration.
Thanks!
Thank you for reading this! I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know if you have any questions my twitter is always open, or send me an email.
Also if you like what I'm doing and want to support me: https://www.patreon.com/anvaka