cambecc

earth.nullschool.net predates Windy. The first version of Windy was based on the earth.nullschool.net repo.

thanks!

what the hell? why was this post deleted?

Hi. I'm the creator of the site. Unfortunately, each time the globe orientation changes, the distortion caused by the projection needs to be recalculated. Tried to think of ways to make this faster or save computations, but haven't found any good solutions yet.

Exactly! The globe is SVG and the animation is a Canvas layered on top. However, I'm still using D3's projection logic to calculate the distortion. Yeah, could save on redoing the distortion calc if just globe rotation changes, but would still need to redo the grid interpolation. So, to keep it easy I just rerun the whole deal.

WebGL would be fun to learn, but AFAIK not supported by mobile browsers yet.

The NCEP data provides only 1º resolution, so bilinear interpolation is used to fill in the gaps. How much interpolation is needed depends on the zoom level and the projection. On top of that, the distortion caused by the projection must be applied to the interpolated wind field. All of these heavy calculations are done up front so the animation can be as fast as possible. So each time the orientation of the globe changes, we have to redo the calculations.

I have heavily acknowledged their work in tweets, on fb, on github, and in the about page. I have also thanked them directly. Also happy to note that most articles about the site also acknowledge the influence from hint.fm.

Tokyo Wind Map is a personal project I've used to learn javascript, node.js, when.js, postgres, D3 and browser programming.

So... taking this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, if you don't trust RDRAND, then you should also not trust _any_ of the hardware the OS runs on. I imagine there would be much easier ways for Intel to implement backdoors to the system than through the non-deterministic random number generator.