A new visualization system for displaying NOAA weather data

Weather models provide a great deal of information; however, current display systems are not easily understood by a lay person. A new online, interactive weather displays system was built with several goals in mind. We wanted to modernize the display of weather model data using techniques to make the data easy to understand, create a simple to use interface and provide access to users from anywhere on any device. The display is able to visualize global wind vectors from the NOAA GFS model using a tracers technique that is able to show change over time of both wind direction and magnitude. The user is also able to toggle on and off additional layers including a day-night terminator, and other weather variables including surface temperature, surface air pressure, atmospheric moisture, and accumulated precipitation. The design leverages the use of the user's GPU to provide an interactive view of model weather data projected onto a 3D Globe using d3.js and Three.js JavaScript libraries. This talk will focus on the architecture of this new display system and discuss future plans for improvements.

www.nnvl.noaa.gov/global_winds/index.html