Maury's Wind & Current Charts

U.S. Naval Officer Matthew Fontaine Maury developed wind and current charts starting in the 1840's. They helped save shipping companies millions of dollars and avoid losses of life and cargo by giving sailors critical information about wind and current patterns. 

Wind & Current Chart of the North Atlantic-via American Geographical Society Library

Detail off the coast of Tampico, Mexico

As director of charts for the Navy, Maury had access to decades of ships' logs. These logs included routes and weather conditions. During the California gold rush these charts helped shorten the trip from New York to San Francisco by 40 days or more. 

The length of the arrows denotes the strength of the current. Colors indicate the season of each track. The dots represent wind speed as indicated in the legend below.

Here is a detail of the mouth of the Rio De La Plata from one of his South Atlantic charts.

via Yale University Library

Maury went on to map the Pacific and Indian Oceans, monsoon patterns, ranges of the sperm whale and discovered an undersea plateau that could be used for laying the first transatlantic cable. More on his life can be seen in this PBS American Experience article.

Earth Animations

Earth is a project from Cameron Beccario showing a wide range of climatic conditions that can be animated. Here are the winds animated from Hurricane Florence as it made landfall on September 14th.

At the same time an even more intense Typhoon Mangkhut battering the Philippines.

You can choose to look at air or ocean currents, waves, water and air temperatures (at different heights)  and various other factors. You can even switch map projections. Here are ocean waves using the Waterman Butterfly projection,

and ocean currents in the North Atlantic, looking very Van Gogh-like.

Data are from various global sensors, the geographic data comes from Natural Earth. The visualizations are created in the browser using javascript programming. The color schemes are intuitive enough that no legend is required. Here is the three hour precipitation accumulation over North Carolina from the hurricane.

Another option is the probability of seeing an aurora.

Explore more here

Drifters on the Ocean

In May, 1990 a storm off the coast of Alaska knocked containers off a ship that was on its way from Korea to the United States. Some of the containers broke open sending 61,000 Nike shoes on a journey through the North Pacific Ocean. The following winter hundreds of Nikes washed up on the shores of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon.

To oceanographers these shoes are "drifters," floating objects that enable them to test models of ocean currents. A model known as the Ocean Currents Simulator (OSCURS) predicted that most of these shoes would make landfall in British Columbia about 249 days after the accident. The first ones were found there 220 days after. Later shoes were found off the coast of Oregon showing that the currents diverted some of them to the south. A year and a half later some of them made landfall in Hawaii.

In early 1992, a similar accident sent a bunch of toy ducks into the ocean. Here is a map of "possible journeys" and places they were found over the next 11 years.

To reach the Atlantic Ocean they had to pass through the icy Arctic. They have lost their color, according to this article but many are still floating out there.

For more about ocean currents see these pages from the SEOS project.

Gyres!

This lovely map of Ocean gyres appears in a long winded article on Medium

Gyres are where currents gather large patches of garbage. Much of this garbage is non-biodegradable plastic that is often consumed by fish and other tasty critters. The future effects of all this plastic on humans is not completely understood but it's not likely to be nearly as pretty as the map. Here's a detailed view-a good example of how less can be more in a map.