This is beautiful and a brilliant, intuitive "100,000 feet up" picture of wind movements.
But it's not horribly useful if you are interested in wind conditions at a particular place. Trying to figure out if a spot is experiencing 15mph wind vs 10mph is hard, for instance.
Compare it to these maps: http://passageweather.com/ which are not pretty nor are they intuitive but they are useful for someone trying to use the map to get detailed, localized wind condition information.
It seems like there should be some kind of middle ground between this wind map and maps like passageweater.com, maps that are intuitive and pretty but also provide detailed, useful information.
actually, if you click on the map, you can zoom in, and you can see whether a particular spot is experiencing fierce winds or not. I haven't figured out how to zoom out yet though.
NINJA EDIT: There is an 'unzoom' button on the left!
I can't figure out how to zoom out either because I don't think they've implemented that functionality. You can also zoom in infinitely...which is strange.
they just need to add mouseover details. Rough wind speeds are already indicated by line density, using color would just waste that variable so you couldn't use it for things like pressure. That would be a super cool visualization and again details could be provided by mouseover data.
It would also be cool if you could zoom in. There is definitely a lot of local variation in wind speed/direction that you have to filter out when looking at the entire US but would still be very interesting to see.
But it's not horribly useful if you are interested in wind conditions at a particular place. Trying to figure out if a spot is experiencing 15mph wind vs 10mph is hard, for instance.
Compare it to these maps: http://passageweather.com/ which are not pretty nor are they intuitive but they are useful for someone trying to use the map to get detailed, localized wind condition information.
It seems like there should be some kind of middle ground between this wind map and maps like passageweater.com, maps that are intuitive and pretty but also provide detailed, useful information.