8 February 2016

Science Fun:

John English told me about this cool website that animates global weather, especially wind on water.  The website is called earth, “a visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers updated every three hours.”

Click on the screenshot above to see conditions in the eastern North Pacific. Before you do, here are some tips:

• In the animation, slow winds are blue to green, intense winds are orange to red.
• Everywhere on earth, the most exciting winds are those surrounding low pressure systems.  In the northern hemisphere, they circle counter-clockwise. (How to remember this? See below.)
• Notice the blank zones where there’s no wind. The largest are often in the center of high pressure zones.  Some of these line up with the warm water “Blobs” that are killing seabirds by starvation.
• If you watch for 60 seconds more winds on the continent will start to show up. They aren’t as intense.
• Click and drag to change the location of the map.
• Click on the word [earth] at bottom left to change the parameters.  Select a new Mode to see pollution (“chem”) or dust/smoke (“particulate”).

Follow this quick link to see the North Atlantic and Great Lakes map.  There’s usually less excitement here but look north toward Greenland and you’ll see why the North Atlantic is a dangerous place to cross in winter.

And for a really tangled mess of wind click here to see the air flow between South America and Antarctica!

Visit “earth” on Facebook for more screenshots and videos of amazing storms.  You don’t need a Facebook login; just click on the link.

BONUS: Here’s how to identify low and high pressure systems in the northern hemisphere based on the direction the winds are circling. Use the right-hand rule. Curl your fingers in the direction of the winds (B) and point your thumb. The air column (I) is moving in the direction of your thumb. Low pressure sucks the air column up; high pressure pushes it down. The orientation of this diagram would be a low pressure system in the northern hemisphere.

(screenshot of the earth wind map from earth.nullschool.net, right-hand rule illustration from Wikipedia)