
Wind Map - taylorbuley
http://hint.fm/wind/
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uvdiv
Not actually a good representation for wind energy potential, because wind
power is cubic in wind speed (v^2 for kinetic energy per unit volume, times
v^1 for volume/(cross sectional area * unit time)). So energy potential is
concentrated in the "long tail", infrequent high winds. (E.g. 30 mph is 8x
more powerful than 15 mph, 27x more than 10 mph). The distribution looks much
more "uneven" -- both in space (clustered) and time (fluctuating) -- than a
linear-in-windspeed map shows.

Off topic: if anyone's looking for a slightly gigantic weather history dataset
("oodles of terabytes"), look at [1]. It has accumulated "a few thousand"
weather stations, at 5 minute intervals, going back "a few" years (I forget
the numbers).

[1] <http://madis.noaa.gov/>

~~~
scblock
It's easy enough to convert something like that to energy potential, but when
determining whether a site has good potential for wind energy development we
really do tend to think of the wind in terms of speed (in m/s) and not energy
density.

Depending on the capture technology (even specific wind turbine models using a
certain technology) and project arrangement the variation even at a single
location is very high.

And this is a beautiful visualization of the flow.

~~~
doubtfully
If you are in the business of determining whether a site has good potential
for wind energy development, answer me this if you can: what is the maximum
realistic potential percentage of the U.S. energy consumption that windpower
could satisfy in 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years given realistic conditions
(funding, available land, etc.)?

~~~
scblock
That question is literally a massive research project and I couldn't begin to
answer it here. The best place to start is probably the DOE 20 percent by 2030
report released in 2008.

<http://www.20percentwind.org/20p.aspx?page=Report>

The US has huge amounts of available wind energy, but constrained supply
chain, development, and transmission resources. 20% by 2030 is technically
possible but will require huge amounts of work.

~~~
Someone
Note for those unfamiliar with the field: there is a considerable difference
between "X% of electricity use" and "X% of power use" (for the USA, about a
1:6 factor, if I read
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States> correctly). That
20percentwind.org site, to me, has the former as a goal.

~~~
tarre
You have it right. 20 % of electricity use means, that on average power is the
same 20 %. When it is blowing in large areas, more than 50 % of electric power
is produced by wind turbines and when it's not blowing the percentage may be
very small. In Portugal the maximum power share wind turbines have had is 75
%, though only 17 % on average is produced by wind.[1]

This creates two problems:

1) You need to have a lot of transmission capacity, which is used very
inefficiently. With conventional powerplants you can forecast pretty easily,
where and how much electricity is produced and consumed and you can size power
grid accordingly (with backup capacities, of course). With wind power the
production places and amounts are all the time changeing and you should have
plenty of capacity, of which on average only small share is used.

2) To cover the consumption during non-windy times, you need to maintain
backup power plants, which should be able to follow load rapidly. Water power
is ideal for this, but as penetration level raises you need also other power
plants, gas turbines for example (but who wants to maintain a turbine, which
is used rarely...). Also batteries may be applied in the future, but in large
scale that is nowadays pretty much science fiction.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Penetration>

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jordanb
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.

~~~
dfc
Is a 5 mile an hour difference important?

~~~
lacerus
Yes, absolutely, for many sports that rely on wind, such as wind- or kite-
surfing.

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lutorm
Beautiful visualization! It would be interesting to have an underlay showing
the topography so one can correlate features in the wind pattern with mountain
ranges, etc.

~~~
crisnoble
If you could get at the GIS data sets you would be golden. Anyone know of an
easy way to integrate GIS data into web applications?

~~~
lbotos
Would something like tilemill help? <http://www.tilemill.com>

~~~
crisnoble
That is the coolest thing I have seen in a very long time. Thank you!

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nextstep
This reminds me of the proof that there is always a point on the earth where
there is no wind. This is a property of spherical surfaces:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem>

~~~
cbr
There is only a windless spot on earth if you take wind to mean air moving
horizontal to the earth's surface. Otherwise imagine that we have wind that
points north along the ground, with wind pointing up at the north pole and
down at the south pole (and higher up wind comes back south).

~~~
nextstep
That's a good point. I think the surface you are describing (that the wind
would sweep out) would be a torus. The 2-torus is "combable."

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gibybo
I am used to seeing wind markings on aviation maps (e.g.
<http://www.aviationweather.gov/adds/winds/>) but it's pretty cool how much
clearer this map is. It makes me wish I could see a much larger portion of the
world so I could get a better understanding of the currents that are
entering/exiting the US.

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crazygringo
That's amazing. It's so inspiring to see someone can have such a simple idea,
execute, and create something not only incredibly intuitive and useful, but
beautiful too.

It makes you wonder what other things are out there waiting to be done, and
what you can do.

~~~
iamwil
I'm not so sure it's exactly simple to implement. A quick glance at the code,
it seems like they had to implement vector field support from scratch.

~~~
malandrew
I haven't looked at the code and how they implemented vector field support,
but couldn't a library like Sylvester have been used?

<http://sylvester.jcoglan.com/>

Paper.js looks like it could work as well:

<http://paperjs.org/about/>

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th0ma5
been wanting to do this myself for like forever. it looks like they are using
high level summary data from the NWS ... they also have this amazing thing
called MADIS which focuses on micro climate research (and more) ... so in
theory you could get a high resolution version of this for san francisco or
nyc, and that'd be really great and possibly rather useful too. I think the
Weather Underground is a subscriber of MADIS, and their "rapid update" feature
has some of this, and also I should mention some of this is collected by ham
radio people in their spare time too.

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BHSPitMonkey
Never before has a piece of software made me wish for a hurricane to ravage my
country simply out of curiosity.

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run4yourlives
This is beautiful, but I find it lacking because of the focus on the US
mainland exclusively. It would be nice to see North America as a whole along
with a good part of the Pacific and Atlantic, because these areas have a
massive effect on wind patterns.

For example, the wind over the Chicago is travelling "backwards" for no
apparent reason. This is most likely due to this being the "backward half" of
a cyclonic system centred over Canada.

The other thing that struck me is the effect the Southwest desert has on wind
patterns over all... just, wow.

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Edootjuh
Very cool. It's interesting to see how elevation affects the wind here
(<http://www.theodora.com/maps/new9/usa_elevation_map.gif>), but I'd wish
there was a worldwide version. (I'm aware that you need a data source)

Should you be interested, here's data from the Netherlands:
<http://www.knmi.nl/samenw/hydra/cgi-bin/register.cgi>

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nix
They are using a bad dataset. Some of the discontinuities you see are
administrative boundaries between National Weather Service forecast offices.

<http://nixweb.com/dust/> is my version, for the SF Bay Area only. It was 15
years ago so pardon my Java applet.

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tpurves
Where is the wind over the water? Who cares about what the is on land? As a
sailor, I find this map frustrating and upsetting for showing me beautiful
wind everywhere I _can't_ sail a boat.

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blueski
Beautifully done. Just discovered you can zoom in by double clicking.

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krosaen
very pretty. related: <http://windhistory.com>

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jeremyarussell
I got lost for quite awhile looking at all the wind and how it moves around
the area I'm pretty sure is my mountainous home. Kudos to the maker(s).

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mbostock
This appears to be an animated form of line integral convolution. Cabral and
Leedom paper's from SIGGRAPH '93, Imaging Vector Fields Using Line Integral
Convolution (PDF):

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115.1636&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

~~~
datatelling
This is great, Mike - thanks for sharing the doc.

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mahyarm
They should add Canada, Mexico and the ocean if possible to see where these in
and out flows are coming from.

~~~
th0ma5
or tie it in with the ocean viz from nasa from the other day! unfortunately
most of the data i could find for canada was only in the south, and the mexico
data was similarly in only the more densely populated areas.

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brownbat
My favorite wind potential graph, NPR's "Visualizing the U.S. Electric Grid"

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109973...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398)

Makes offshore look pretty good.

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joejohnson
This visualization is incredible but it made my browser freeze for almost a
minute :(

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jjcm
Really a stunning presentation of this data. A huge "whoa." moment when it
loaded.

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Uchikoma
Brilliant.

On a side node: Anyone else reminded of Deluxe Paint palette cycling
animations by this?

~~~
ssdsa
Yes, of course! The master of this technique is here:
<http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/>

~~~
Uchikoma
Thanks!

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prbuckley
This would be even cooler if you could display wind speeds at different
elevations above the ground. I am guessing that at a certain elevation you
have higher winds that kites might be able to capture energy from.

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iamwil
It's also neat because you can tell where the mountains are. They're the
sections where the wind was pretty slow, and then it speeds up and then slows
down again. You can see it over the Rocky Mountains.

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samstave
I can zoom really far in by double-clicking, but I cant zoom back out.

I have to refresh to zoom out.

This is BEAUTIFUL.

It would be cool to see the different speed ranges reflected by [color of my
choice] as well!

~~~
unreal37
There's an UNZOOM button on the left.

~~~
samstave
What do you want? Me to actually READ the websites!?

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dfj225
This would be even better if it could display change over time. To support,
for example, animate the change in wind direction for the past week.

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th0ma5
some previous visual inspiration possibly for project: (based on lidar data)
<http://www.datatelling.com/2011/07/29/wind-flow/>

[http://www.shiffman.net/itp/classes/nature/week06_s09/flowfi...](http://www.shiffman.net/itp/classes/nature/week06_s09/flowfield/)

as well as the big nasa ocean viz from the past few days

~~~
spot
predates both of those by quite a bit: <http://nixweb.com/dust/>

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xbryanx
Odd that they didn't label any of the cities in the places that seem to have
the greatest generation potential.

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adlep
This will be a great tool for paragliders. I will post this on
paraglidingforums Thanks for the link.

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pragmatic
A nice addition might be the current locations of wind farms (if that data is
accessible someplace).

~~~
toomuchtodo
Have already been working on an app for this (just for lulz); haven't had time
to finish it yet. I pull from public DOE data regarding generation locations.

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dgudkov
Looks beautiful but barely usable. Winds have different speed and direction at
different altitudes.

~~~
kfury
This. The site should clearly state whether they're showing 1000ft prevailing
winds, jetstream-level currents (around 30,000 feet) or more surface-level
effects. All the people talking about power generation from this data should
be aware that the only wind that matters there is below 1,000 ft (in many
cases, far below 1,000 ft.)

~~~
crazygringo
"Surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database."

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kevinslin8
its been said by others but this is an incredible visualization of a massive
amount of data in a beautiful and intuitive medium. it'll be interesting to
have this for other large datasets eg. real time web usage...

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brownbat
So... I want this for all of the world, extrapolated over the oceans.

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sidwyn
Looks a lot like a chunk of hair. Very neat implementation!

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crisnoble
I wish they would make this open source. It is beautiful.

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ww520
Wow that's cool. Where do you get the wind data?

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Slie
I love this i think it is really cool. Where is Alaska and the rest of the
united states?

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paraschopra
I want color!

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white_raven
I want this as a screen saver!

~~~
DivisibleByZero
I was thinking a desktop background version.

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afterburner
Wind power, baby.

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MyNewAccount
beautiful, but not sure how useful it is?

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voodoochilo
great stuff, but my cputemp is in the clouds

