back to article This interactive wind map is a Big Data lava lamp

If you're reading El Reg you're obviously taking a little break from your workday [au contraire - you're enriching your portfolio of business-critical knowledge in a fashion which your boss would heartily endorse - Ed]. And if you want to amuse yourself with how a big data set with proper visualization can not only change your …

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  1. 27escape
    Thumb Up

    The flash animation is very interesting, it would seem that there are some areas where wind is 'generated' and some areas where the wind seems to go into a sink.

    It would be interesting to overlay mountain ranges to see how this affects the wind pattern.

    1. SkippyBing

      The wind should appear to be coming from high pressure areas and going towards low pressure areas, note it's slightly more complicated than that due to the Coriolis effect. High pressure areas are where air is sinking down from higher levels as it cools while low pressure areas are where it's rising, generally through heating of the surface, e.g. the Equator. Once it gets to the surface it tries to equalise by flowing horizontally.

      Google Global Circulation for a less cack handed explanation...

      1. Darryl
        Trollface

        When I just looked, it appeared that Los Angeles blows and New York sucks...

        <insert joke here>

        1. tpm (Written by Reg staff)

          Perfect!

      2. David Pollard

        Warming and condensing

        Pressure systems are quite complicated when precipitation is taken into account.

        Condensation reduces pressure; and it warms the air with latent heat. Also the density of the air increases as raindrops form because of the reduction in the proportion of water (molecular weight 18 vs an average of about 29 for air). So warmer and drier air at lower pressure can be more dense than cooler, wetter air.

  2. John McCallum
    Meh

    Wind up

    This is a great big advert for Chrome.If you don't have it you can't see the maps,oh you can see the outline but that is all.

    1. SkippyBing

      Re: Wind up

      Works for me in Opera, maybe it's just you?

    2. Armando 123

      Re: Wind up

      Uh, works with OmniWeb...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Works for me in the latest Firefox also. Whatever browser you're using must be out of date.

    1. Robert E A Harvey

      worked for me this morning in FF 5.0

  4. AlexS
    FAIL

    If you look closely the picture posted is William Shatners hair piece.

  5. Winkypop Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Political overlay?

    I'd like know where the GOP candidates are right now to see if their location relates to an increase in wind (hot air).

  6. DHBI

    Really Big Data?

    It's a neat piece of work (speaking as a geophysicist) but is it really Big Data (speaking as someone who works on Big Data in the geophysical world)? "Big data" usually has connotations around the need to crunch the data to produce some insight in a challenging timeframe and whose form (and maybe content) changes more rapidly than a system and data architect might be comfortable with. This is a "big" volume of data but surely it's just processed as a batch job every hour in a predictable and consistent way? Thanks for posting the article anyway!

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