Skip to main content

Stunning interactive map traces the course of the wind

Stunning interactive map traces the course of the wind

/

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have created Wind Map, an interactive map which traces the course and speed of wind in near real-time.

Share this story

Windmap
Windmap

Wind direction: it's not the most exciting subject we can think of, but visualization designers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have crafted something truly awe-inspiring from it. Wind Map pulls in hourly data from the National Digital Forecast Database, tracing wind speed and direction in near real-time while providing nationwide maximum and average figures. The result is something remarkably similar to NASA's Perpetual Ocean video, only Wind Map is an interactive, zoomable, and constantly changing project. The designers say they would like to expand the map to cover the entire globe, and want your help to track down global statistics.

Viégas and Wattenberg are well known in the field — they created IBM's "Many Eyes" platform before joining Google to lead its "Big Picture" visualization research group. Their work is a mixture of function and beauty, but don't take our word for it — join us in procrastination at the source link below.