Idea for Wind visualisation
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Looking at the wind map and being able to customise it is really cool, however, this 'Speed' slider gave me an idea:
What if the speed were not applied to ALL wind vectors, but some areas would move faster than others depending on the REAL wind speed at the location at the time? This would provide really quick and intuitive visualisation to see what the wind is like worldwide (and doesn't seem that far-fetched of an idea to implement programmatically, at least I hope haha
This can always be an extra feature so that users who prefer this, could keep it. I think the best way to visualise wind speed is with wind speed, as the colour map does not provide such quick intuitive idea!
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@Dilees – Apologies if I've misunderstood your question; but I think you might be misinterpreting what the visualization acutally does.
I'm sure you realise that Windy's particle animation moves more slowly in areas of low speed relative to windier areas. The "tail" of the particle is also longer where it's windier. If I read this right, you want the wind to move at the pace of the "real" wind. But you can't – you wouldn't see it move.
Imagine a frontal system postitioned over the Azores in the mid-Atlantic, which is moving eastwards with a speed of 15kt. If you were in the Azores, you might experience a wind of 15kt which is noticable. But by the time the frontal system has reached the Bay of Biscay 2000km away, 3 days will have passed. So basically, if Windy visualised a particle within this airflow, the particle would take 3 days to move across the screen.
The particle animation therefore appears to have winds that flow THROUGH features like weather fronts, which makes no meteorological sense... but it gives a great "feel" for where the stronger winds are and how they curve on a planetary scale.
Does that make any sense? I might be way off base, please feel free to clarify your question :)
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@Dilees
With the visualisation of wind vectors you have chosen, you probably don’t see that their speed and length change according to wind speed. This is more obvious with the standard Windy setting of wind vectors. For example here with storm BrendanIn addition, using my customized wind color scale, the Wind layer is more intuitive (at least for me).
If you want to have the wind vectors shown at « real speed », consider a strong wind at 60kt i.e. more than 110km/h. Along a Great Circle, the wind vector should move with a speed of 1° per hour. Just imagine what it gives on your screen...approximately no movement !
Use for that the Distance&planning tool.To see a particle move over this distance, you would have to stay one hour in front of your screen.
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@johnckealy @idefix37
Good points made here, thank you.
New idea: with the current scale, it would be good to explain the length of the vector, which is currently either 'Short' or 'Long', but instead it could be expressed by the distance a particle travels in 'Short = 30 minutes', 'Long = 5 hours'.So if there's barely any wind, setting it to display the length it travels in 5 hours would still be a short line, which is exactly the same as now, but would give better intuition for me to understand the strength of the wind with real life measures (it could go like "oh, in 5 hours a particle in this location is about to move from Oxford to London, takes less time to drive there by car, so the wind is pretty weak").
What do you think?
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@Dilees
By using "distance & planning" tool
and with observed wind speed e.g. 10 kts
you can see that an air particle over Wembley will be after 1 hour
just north from Enfield.
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@Dilees said in Idea for Wind visualisation:
it could be expressed by the distance a particle travels in 'Short = 30 minutes', 'Long = 5 hours'.
With the current settings, it’s the opposite: a short vector means more time e.g 5 hours, a long vector less time e.g. 30 minutes, to cover the same distance.
As @Gkikas-LGPZ explains, the best solution to know the running time of a particle on a given distance is to use the Distance&planning tool. -
yeah very cool. Do you know how to make like that if I have spatial dataset of wind for 1 month? thanks a lot guys