(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man
e. e. cummings, what if a much of a which of a wind
Open data is great. The National Digital Forecast Database offers free access to all the weather forecast data of the US National Weather Service. All of the US is covered with the predicted values for variables that influence the weather, like cloud cover, temperature, wind speed and direction.
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, two artists from Cambridge, Ma. have turned the wind forecast into a beautiful visualization. On their remarkable site http://hint.fm there are many fantastic data-viz projects, like the Flickr Flow, that give the best examples, what treasures are to be excavated from open data sources.
Not just because of hurrican Sandy, the Wind Map is one of the best cases they have on display. This is beautiful data!