Great wind map

Wow!
Love it. I had no idea there were so many swirls. The one just off the Washington coast/ BC coast is very interesting. I wonder how often that occurs. I had thought we had a general on-shore flow when a storm was coming in. Apparently Not so.

Chuck
 
The map depicts current wind conditions, when you log on. The swirls are generally centered on frontal systems -- the counterclockwise swirls are the lows, where cold air is descending and turning to the left due to the coriolis effect of earth's rotation, and the clockwise rotations are high pressure areas (of generally good weather) where warm air is lifting and spinning to the left.

Our daughter is a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) specialist and she forwarded on this map to me knowing I am interested in weather and mapping.

I find rotating the map (click, hold, and drag) into a view from the south pole yields a wonderful artistic view of wind patterns circulating now around the south polar regions.

Earlier wind views of North America were showing he polar vortex and the bands of arctic cold moving through the midwest into the east coastal regions, as the warm arctic regions spalled off the cold bands down to Chicago, Atlanta, etc.

The effects of global warming being reported in research articles by my geology colleagues is reflected in these wind patterns as well.

I have been in contact with geologists in universities discussing the need to revise what is being taught now in many geology courses, and how it differs from what we learned many years ago as geology undergrads. We live in a different world today from the world we knew in college.

Paleoclimatology was important background for my professional work in managing ground water resources in arid regions -- much of the groundwater in Nevada was a 'remnant' of past climatic cycles, and today's changing cycle is having a huge effect on movement and storage of groundwater today.

It might be of interest to some, off the boating subject, that scientists can age date the water you drink. It was fascinating to me to discover that much of the groundwater I was drinking (derived from deep wells) in central Nevada fell as rain at a time long before my father was born!

We were tracking the age and movement of groundwater in the area of underground nuclear testing to see how long it would be before you would start glowing in the dark. Urg!
 
Nice link, than you.

As a side note google earth is great for many things. I used it the other night to show just how big the pacific ocean is. Bring up google earth with the North and South America in view. Living here that's the View of the earth we see the most in media. It also gives you a idea of how big the area you are looking at is. Now rotate the globe until you only see the pacific. You will have land just at the very edges. Japan, chili, California, Alaska, and the coast of Antarctica.

The rest is all ocean. It gives you a really neat and easy to understand image of just how big the Pacific is. You can then rotate the globe to the west and fit all of china, Russia , India, Australia,the middle east, most of Europe, the Indian ocean and just about all of Africa in the same space. Thats most of the land mass of the planet and 9/10's of the population in the same space used by one ocean. In comparison the Atlantic is a pond.
 
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