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Comment by athst | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool, but it is clearly heavily influenced in design by Viegas and Wattenberg's Wind Map: http://hint.fm/wind/

The creator should really acknowledge their work...

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I have heavily acknowledged their work in tweets, on fb, on github, and in the about page. I have also thanked them directly. Also happy to note that most articles about the site also acknowledge the influence from hint.fm.

Out of programmer curiosity, is there a reason you have to stop rendering the globe while its moving?

The NCEP data provides only 1º resolution, so bilinear interpolation is used to fill in the gaps. How much interpolation is needed depends on the zoom level and the projection. On top of that, the distortion caused by the projection must be applied to the interpolated wind field. All of these heavy calculations are done up front so the animation can be as fast as possible. So each time the orientation of the globe changes, we have to redo the calculations.

This makes more sense in light of the view supporting zoom, which didn't occur to me the first time I visited the page. Perhaps add a note in the corner?

"On top of that, the distortion caused by the projection must be applied to the interpolated wind field."

I think I'm missing something. Are you overlaying a drawing canvas over the globe and handling your own custom projection then? Is it not possible to dynamically draw to a webgl texture and let the gpu take care of projection?

I do understand why you'd have to restart on zoom. Overall its an excellent project you have here.

Exactly! The globe is SVG and the animation is a Canvas layered on top. However, I'm still using D3's projection logic to calculate the distortion. Yeah, could save on redoing the distortion calc if just globe rotation changes, but would still need to redo the grid interpolation. So, to keep it easy I just rerun the whole deal.

WebGL would be fun to learn, but AFAIK not supported by mobile browsers yet.

WebGL is at the least supported by the default browser on the Galaxy S II, and presumably newer models. It doesn't support floating point textures, however.

Beautiful!

How difficult it is to set this up for a custom local site that produces surface wind forecasts in GRIB2? Would it work for a small grid like this http://www.norcalsoaring.org/BLIP/BYRON/index.html ?

Your visualisation reminds me of what could be possible for a meteorologist with a setup provided by WSI:

http://www.wsi.com/products-media.htm

With their tools for meteorologists you can layer up all the data layers from the GRIB, radar, observations, pollen etc. as well as the forecast data to 'see' and explore the weather in quite astounding ways. Think of what you have here but in lots more resolution with untold extra layers of data - it is a fun way to understand the world that we should all be seeing and doing by now instead of just getting a screenful of dumb icons.

It seems that the likes of WSI are quite happy to serve the market for dumb icons rather than make their deluxe weather tools available to all on an app. Imagine if everyone could be an amateur forecaster and submit useful observation data from their phone to get fed back into the 'model'.

The meteorologists are keeping the best tools from us thinking we would not be interested, your site encourages me to think otherwise.

Relax; they credit it on the about page: http://earth.nullschool.net/about.html

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