Hi. I'm the creator of the site. Unfortunately, each time the globe orientation changes, the distortion caused by the projection needs to be recalculated. Tried to think of ways to make this faster or save computations, but haven't found any good solutions yet.
From a usability aspect at least, you could keep the same distortion until the interaction ends, and then tween the distortion values to the new orientation over a second or two. Technically it'd be 'wrong' for a short time, but it'd be nicer to use.
Not sure if it is feasible but a slider control for height would show the transition from high altitude (circulation currents) through to surface conditions really nicely. Hard to cache the animation I imagine.
I have heavily acknowledged their work in tweets, on fb, on github, and in the about page. I have also thanked them directly. Also happy to note that most articles about the site also acknowledge the influence from hint.fm.
With their tools for meteorologists you can layer up all the data layers from the GRIB, radar, observations, pollen etc. as well as the forecast data to 'see' and explore the weather in quite astounding ways. Think of what you have here but in lots more resolution with untold extra layers of data - it is a fun way to understand the world that we should all be seeing and doing by now instead of just getting a screenful of dumb icons.
It seems that the likes of WSI are quite happy to serve the market for dumb icons rather than make their deluxe weather tools available to all on an app. Imagine if everyone could be an amateur forecaster and submit useful observation data from their phone to get fed back into the 'model'.
The meteorologists are keeping the best tools from us thinking we would not be interested, your site encourages me to think otherwise.
The NCEP data provides only 1º resolution, so bilinear interpolation is used to fill in the gaps. How much interpolation is needed depends on the zoom level and the projection. On top of that, the distortion caused by the projection must be applied to the interpolated wind field. All of these heavy calculations are done up front so the animation can be as fast as possible. So each time the orientation of the globe changes, we have to redo the calculations.
"On top of that, the distortion caused by the projection must be applied to the interpolated wind field."
I think I'm missing something. Are you overlaying a drawing canvas over the globe and handling your own custom projection then? Is it not possible to dynamically draw to a webgl texture and let the gpu take care of projection?
I do understand why you'd have to restart on zoom. Overall its an excellent project you have here.
Exactly! The globe is SVG and the animation is a Canvas layered on top. However, I'm still using D3's projection logic to calculate the distortion. Yeah, could save on redoing the distortion calc if just globe rotation changes, but would still need to redo the grid interpolation. So, to keep it easy I just rerun the whole deal.
WebGL would be fun to learn, but AFAIK not supported by mobile browsers yet.
WebGL is at the least supported by the default browser on the Galaxy S II, and presumably newer models. It doesn't support floating point textures, however.
This makes more sense in light of the view supporting zoom, which didn't occur to me the first time I visited the page. Perhaps add a note in the corner?
So... taking this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, if you don't trust RDRAND, then you should also not trust _any_ of the hardware the OS runs on. I imagine there would be much easier ways for Intel to implement backdoors to the system than through the non-deterministic random number generator.
