Nullschool: the website that animates Earth's wind and weather

Nullschool, the map that lives at earth.nullschool.net, animates the entire planet's wind as thousands of pale streamlines that drift, curl and race across a globe you can spin with a finger. It is worth opening because it turns an invisible force into something to watch: the jet stream combing the mid latitudes, a hurricane winding into a tight spiral, the trade winds crossing an ocean, all drawn from real forecast data and refreshed through the day. There is no account, no cost and no tutorial, only the weather of the whole world, quietly in motion.

In brief

• Nullschool, at earth.nullschool.net, is a free, interactive map that animates global wind, weather and ocean currents in near real time.
• A Tokyo software engineer named Cameron Beccario built it in December 2013 as a project to learn JavaScript, and released the code under an open licence.
• The moving air is drawn from NOAA's Global Forecast System, the same supercomputer model that underpins ordinary weather forecasts, refreshed every few hours.
• Over the years it has grown far past wind, adding ocean currents, waves, air pollution, carbon dioxide and even the aurora, on a globe you can turn any way you like.

What Nullschool actually shows

The default view is the earth as a dark sphere threaded with pale, moving lines. Each line is a stream of particles following the wind at that spot, so the picture is never still. Gusts flare and fade, storms turn slow spirals, and the great bands of the jet stream sweep across the middle latitudes. Drag the globe and it turns. Scroll and it zooms in. Click any single point and a small readout gives the wind speed and direction there, pinning a number to the motion.

A control panel, opened from the word 'earth' tucked in the corner, is where the map stops being a single trick. From it a reader can switch the projection from a spinning globe to a flat map or a fisheye, change the height in the atmosphere being sampled, and swap what the colours mean, from wind speed to temperature, humidity or air pressure. The animation stays the same. Only the story underneath it changes, which is how one page manages to hold so many.

None of it asks for prior knowledge. A person who has never read a weather chart can still see a typhoon as a knot of spinning light off the coast of Japan, or watch cold air pour off a continent in the depths of winter. The data underneath is entirely serious. The experience on top is closer to a lava lamp for the atmosphere, and that gap between the two is most of the charm.

A learning project that outgrew its purpose

The map was not commissioned by any weather service. According to the project's GitHub repository, it began as a personal project by Cameron Beccario, a software engineer based in Tokyo, who built it to learn JavaScript and browser programming. He released it in December 2013 and put the full source code online under the permissive MIT licence, where it has since gathered several thousand stars from other developers who wanted to see how it worked.

It grew out of something smaller. Earth Island Journal recounts that Beccario first made a prototype mapping air quality over Tokyo, then began to wonder whether there was enough public data to map the wind of the entire planet. There was. The earlier Tokyo experiment became the seed of the global version, and a hobby project quietly turned into one of the most recognisable weather visualisations on the web.

He was open about his influences. The repository credits 'the awesome hint.fm wind map' as its inspiration, a nod to the Wind Map built by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, whose animated map of wind across the United States showed that a plain forecast could look like art. Writing in December 2013, Slate compared Beccario's swirling streamlines to the brushwork of the Impressionists, which is flattering and, on a stormy day, not far wrong.

Where the moving air comes from

The wind is not decorative invention. Nullschool's about page states that most of its data is downloaded directly from the servers of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and that the wind and weather layers come from the Global Forecast System, known as GFS. The map redraws itself as fresh forecast runs arrive every few hours, so what a reader sees is close to the current, real state of the sky rather than a saved snapshot.

The GFS is a heavyweight. NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information describe it as a coupled model, run by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, that stitches together separate models of the atmosphere, ocean, land and sea ice, with a base resolution of roughly twenty-eight kilometres and forecasts that reach sixteen days ahead. Nullschool takes that vast grid of numbers, the same one professional forecasters lean on, and turns it into something a person can simply look at.

That reliance on public data carries a cost. The site currently shows a notice warning that access could be disrupted by staffing changes at NOAA affecting the data it depends on, a quiet reminder that the whole spectacle rests on a public forecasting system that someone has to keep funded and running. A map of the wind, it turns out, is only ever as steady as the agency producing the numbers behind it.

How it draws the wind

The technique is tidy. As the source code explains, the map takes the GFS grid, which gives a wind value only at spaced-out points, and fills the gaps with bilinear interpolation so that every pixel gets a plausible direction. Thousands of particles are then scattered onto the map and nudged along those directions, frame by frame, leaving short trails that fade behind them. The result reads as smooth, continuous flow, even though the data beneath it is a coarse lattice of separate readings.

The drawing itself leans on the D3.js visualisation library, with the animated particles painted onto an HTML5 canvas laid over a vector map of the world. The coastlines come from Natural Earth, a free public map dataset. Because the globe can be reprojected on demand, the code also has to account for the way each projection stretches and bends distance, so that a particle's path follows the true wind rather than the flat shape of the picture. It is careful work worn very lightly.

Beyond wind: oceans, pollution and the aurora

Wind was only the beginning. The about page lists a stack of other layers a reader can switch to: ocean surface currents from the OSCAR project and the Copernicus Marine Service, ocean waves from NOAA's WAVEWATCH III model, and sea surface temperature drawn from several forecasting systems. The same particle animation that traces the wind also traces the slow, looping highways of the sea, so the ocean starts to look as restless as the sky above it.

Then there is the chemistry of the air. Nullschool can colour the globe by carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, drawing on NASA's GEOS-5 model and the Copernicus atmosphere service, and by particulate pollution such as airborne dust and fine soot. For anyone tracking wildfire smoke, or a dust storm marching off the Sahara and across the Atlantic, the map stops being a curiosity and becomes something closer to a genuine tool.

The most theatrical layer points away from the ground entirely. A space weather mode shades the probability of the aurora using NOAA's OVATION model, so a reader can see where the northern and southern lights are most likely to be glowing on a given night. Very few single web pages let a person slide from a typhoon in the Pacific to the aurora over the pole without ever leaving the same spinning globe.

Who actually leans on it

The audience is wider than idle scrollers. Bellingcat, the open-source investigation group, lists the Nullschool map in its online investigation toolkit as a way to check historical wind, weather and pollution conditions, which matters when working out how smoke or fallout would have travelled on a particular day. The historical date picker, which reaches back to 2013, is the feature that makes that kind of reconstruction possible at all.

Teachers reach for it too, as a way to make a lesson on the jet stream or the ocean currents move instead of sitting still on a page. Sailors and storm-watchers use it to follow hurricanes and read the swell. And a large share of visitors simply open it, spin the planet once, and watch the weather breathe, which is a perfectly good reason on its own to keep a browser tab pointed at the entire atmosphere.

Where it sits in the quiet web

Nullschool belongs to a small group of sites that take an enormous, invisible system and make it calmly legible. Its nearest relative already covered here is the Submarine Cable Map, which does for the internet's undersea wiring what Nullschool does for the wind. The Deep Sea maps the ocean straight downward rather than across its surface, and 100,000 Stars plays the same trick on the galaxy, turning a real dataset into somewhere to wander.

It shares their trick of turning a heavy dataset into something a person will happily linger over. The wider Boring Websites network runs on the same unhurried spirit, including Today's Rock, which asks only that you look closely at a single rock for a while. Nullschool asks for a little more, that you look at the whole moving planet, but it makes the request remarkably easy to say yes to.

FAQ

What is Nullschool?

Nullschool, at earth.nullschool.net, is a free interactive map that animates global wind, weather and ocean conditions in near real time. Wind appears as thousands of moving streamlines over a globe you can spin and zoom, and a control panel lets you switch to temperature, ocean currents, air pollution and other layers. It needs no account and nothing to install, only a browser.

Who made it, and is it really free?

It was built by Cameron Beccario, a software engineer in Tokyo, who released it in December 2013 as a project to learn JavaScript. As its GitHub repository shows, the source code is public under the MIT licence, so the project is both free to use and open for others to study or adapt for their own maps.

Where does the weather data come from?

Most of it comes from the United States government. The site's about page says the wind and weather layers use NOAA's Global Forecast System, with ocean, pollution and aurora layers drawing on models from NASA, the Copernicus programme and other agencies. The map refreshes as new forecast data is published, so it stays close to current conditions.

Can it show past weather?

Yes. Nullschool includes a date and time control that reaches back to 2013, letting a reader replay the wind and weather of a specific past day. That feature is why open-source investigators, including Bellingcat, use it to reconstruct how smoke, dust or pollution would have moved at a given moment.

More boring websites like this: Interactive map & globe websites.