Pages

Wednesday 6 September 2017

Irma


Screen shot of Hurricane Irma from Earth Wind Map. Scary, yet people live with the threat, it's part of their lives. No doubt many have no real choice.

3 comments:

Sam Vega said...

A minor coincidence. Yesterday I saw a picture (presumably from a satellite) of Irma on the BBC site. I've got that wind map saved as a favourite, and although I normally only look at it if the weather here in the UK is particularly windy, I checked it out. It was even scarier close up - the colours looked as if they had gone off the scale.

Do you know how they do that wind map? I think it claims to be in real time, but wouldn't it need some kind of measuring devices (anemometers?) all over the globe for it to really depict what is going on? Perhaps it's just a big summary of lots of different local weather reports.

Demetrius said...

Re Sam, NASA was founded in 1958, Sputnik and all that and space etc. as well as all those lovely missiles that protected us. But when they were sending things up especially them with people in they needed to be sure that they could get them back safely. Hence detailed gathering of information and analysis. At some stage, probably after a big bad hurricane they went in for the extreme weather warnings.

A K Haart said...

Sam - I usually look at it as a guide to UK wind too. I don't know how they gather the data but presumably at least some of it is filled in by computer models. Satellites gather surface wind speeds over the oceans but how that is stitched together with individual anemometer readings on land I don't know. Maybe satellites measure both anyway.

Demetrius - yes NASA would need to know, as would many others.