The Weather Report
Visualizing the relationship between humidity and windspeed using real-time weather data
October 14, 2009
This visualization draws upon realtime Yahoo Weather XML data to visualize the relationship between humidity and windspeed for a given ZIP code.
The following design by Josef Muller Brockmann was particularly interesting to me. The forms seem to imply a movement towards some "correct" order, a proper combination. In thinking about the realtime juxtaposition of two properties of the weather, I was interested in seeing what sorts of harmonies and discordances would naturally emerge.
Though data visualizations all too often rely upon arbitrary relationships, we must be careful in assessing such a quality. Looking at the recorded interference patterns used to form a holographic image without knowledge of their being such, we might easily reason that the patterns are of no real significance. Encoded information requires decoding. For holograms, a properly aligned optical apparatus serves as decoder. But for other sorts of encoded information, the viewer's mental faculties provide the only means of decoding.
