At time of writing, Ireland is bracing for a cold snap. The shops are all out of Taytos and bread, the offies are boarding their windows shut. And you can’t have any kind of extreme weather without giving it a nickname these days, so this one is called ‘The Beast From The East’. Last year we had storm Ophelia, and as the storm raged outside, I discovered this neat weather visualisation tool (earth.nullschool.net) so I could watch along in horrified awe. The little panel in the corner of the screen allows you to toggle different views, I screenshotted a few to give you the general idea – but it’s worth going to the website just to see those hypnotic animations. See if you can spot The Beast From The East in my screenshots.
Wind and Surface Air Temperature
Blue is cold. That’s your beast right there. On the website the wind direction is clear from the animation, with the wind passing east to west over Ireland bringing all that cold cold blueness with it. Check out the control panel, almost everything there is a parameter you can change to view different kinds of data. You can even skip back and forward in time, and look at past weather or projected weather. The development team behind the scenes on this are crunching a lot of data.
Ocean Currents at Surface
Look at the wibbly-wobbly Gulf Stream. Let’s shout words of encouragement at it.
Wind + Particulate Matter < 2.5 µm @ Surface
I’m not entirely sure what this means. Pretty sciencey.
So, that about wraps up another exciting edition of Dave Recommends. Again, that’s earth.nullschool.net
TDNTav 