earth

The page opens on a dark globe wrapped in swirling streamlines. Those moving lines are the wind, drawn from forecast data, and you can spin the planet, zoom in and watch weather systems curl across oceans and continents. It is the sort of picture that makes a hurricane look like a piece of generative art.

A menu in the corner lets you switch layers, so you can look at temperature, ocean currents, waves or air pollution instead of wind. Click anywhere to drop a marker and read the values at that spot. Cameron Beccario created the site, and it updates from real forecast data rather than looping a pretty animation.

It rewards idle exploration. Change the projection, drift over the poles, then compare how the same region looks in different layers. It also works on phones, although the full effect is best on a large screen. Weather nerds will lose an hour; everyone else will lose ten minutes and feel calmer. More in the same spirit lives in /category/data-viz, and /site/windy is a close cousin.