Knowing which way the wind blows

Hint.FM is the collaborative brainchild of Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, who "lead Google's 'Big Picture' visualization research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts". They describe their work together as follows:

Before joining Google, the two founded Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio focused on media and consumer-oriented projects. Prior to Flowing Media, they led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many Eyes. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the "history flow" project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia.

Viégas is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg’s visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One of the fascinating products of their work together is a real-time map of wind flow over the continental United States. Here's a screenshot of the map (open it in a new window or tab for a larger view).




It takes a 'snapshot' of current wind conditions across the country, then displays them graphically. More lines, moving more quickly, denote high wind speeds; low winds are shown by few lines, moving slowly. You'll find more details at the site.

I highly recommend clicking over to the 'Wind Map' and seeing it for yourself. Place your cursor at any point on the map to see the wind speed and direction there, and click on any point to zoom in on that area. I plan to bookmark the map for future reference, as I think it'll shed a new and interesting light on the national weather forecast - not to mention showing me what's headed in my direction!

Peter