Brits love to talk about the weather, so what better thing to write about for my first blog-post in many moons, than you guessed it — a big fat Arctic vortex that has landed over the USA.
The above is an annotated snapshot I created of an interactive visualisation created by Cameron Beccario — inspired by a hint.fm wind-map, and based on his previous work in visualising a wind map of Tokyo. The visualisation employs the D3 JavaScript visualisation library, and runs out-of-the-box on modern browsers — a triumph among the reams of applications that require the client to install special software that is clunky and annoying for the average user.
The snapshot focuses on the current polar vortex ’drop’ that is hanging over the USA, created by a rare event last seen in the Winter 1985 Arctic Outbreak, whereby the polar jet stream that is of an elongated shape and usually centered over Baffin Island in Canada (with the other end centered in NorthEast Siberia), extends further South, bringing Arctic weather conditions that would usually be seen over Northern Canada and Greenland downwards over North/East USA.
People might wonder what exactly a jet stream is, and I’m certainly no meteorology expert, but by thinking of the Earth and its atmosphere contained in a rotating slightly-stretched globe, with the space between the land and the container being filled with a fluid, one can picture a pretty messy situation, with fluid being pushed around by mountains, forming regular currants within the globe. Its actual wind-dynamics are similar to fluids — in fact, the actual mathematical dynamics of a jet-stream are calculated with a component being fluid shear-stress, with Rossby waves and the movements of the jet-stream it creates accounting for the weather we experience — shaping the direction of the wind into spiraling structures also known as cyclones and anti-cyclones.
The Telegraph online has a live stream of events, and the visualisation can be skipped backwards and forwards in time to see exactly where the jet-stream is moving, and how the polar vortex it is creating is likely to change. It has currently inched East over the past day, and is forecast to flatten out and move in a Northerly direction over the USA, with its bottom hanging over the Antarctic Ocean, which means continuing ice-cold weather for us Brits.
