Wind Map

In March 2012, visualization researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg — both then leading Google's 'Big Picture' data visualization group — quietly launched hint.fm/wind, a website that displayed real-time wind patterns across the contiguous United States as thousands of delicate, flowing white particle traces on a dark background. The data came from the National Digital Forecast Database, updated every hour, and the visualization used HTML5 canvas to animate tiny particles that moved in the direction and speed of the local wind. The effect was mesmerizing: on calm days, the map showed gentle, swirling eddies; during storms, dramatic rivers of air rushed visibly across the continent. The Wind Map went viral almost immediately, garnering millions of views and widespread media coverage. It was featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, making it one of the first data visualizations to be acquired by a major art museum as a work of art in its own right. During Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, the site saw a massive spike in traffic as people watched the hurricane's spiral structure play out in real time on their screens. Viégas and Wattenberg had been collaborating since their days at IBM's Visual Communication Lab, where they created groundbreaking social visualizations like History Flow (tracking Wikipedia edits) and Many Eyes (one of the first platforms for public, collaborative data visualization). The Wind Map crystallized their philosophy that data visualization could be simultaneously rigorous, useful, and beautiful — a piece of living art that just happened to also be a practical weather tool.