See where the US wind blows

17:40 30 March 2012

Picture of the Day

Caroline Morley, online picture researcher

(Image: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg)

As a child on a breezy spring day I once lost my kite. Once my tears had dried I imagined where the wind might take it and who might find it.

Digital artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg might have been able to tell me: they have created a live wind map of the US that traces the paths of the winds in close to real time. Once an hour the website takes the raw data from the National Digital Forecast Database and converts it into a seething mass of lines flowing over the landscape.

The artists, who lead Google's Big Picture visualisation research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, state: "Our medium is data visualization, a technology developed by computer scientists to extract insights from raw numbers."

In this still frame from 11 am EDT today, we can see where the kite-flying weather is. Chicago is known as the Windy City: now we can see the winds coming down from Canada and the Great Lakes. There is also a swirl in the south and the strongest winds flowing across the west and north to Canada.

So now if you let go of your kite or balloon, you can see where it is going. And if you want to see where your message in the bottle is going you could try using the new visualisations from NASA on the ocean currents.