My mom sent me this website a couple of weeks ago. http://hint.fm/wind/index.html  It shows the direction and speed of surface winds for the entire country. This screen shot doesn’t do it justice, because on the webpage, the wind lines flow. Beautiful.

In addition to being mesmerizing and beautiful, the map is very educational. When you look at it closely, you’ll see that the winds are flowing from blank areas to areas where they curl and swirl. The blank areas are areas of high air pressure, pushing extra air out; the swirls are areas of low pressure, where the air is sucked in.

Even more interesting is that the swirling lows often represent bad weather with high winds. The lows pull in moisture, in this case from the Gulf of Mexico. This is the moisture coming in for our storm tonight.

The Wind Map was created, not by the National Weather Service, or similar group, but as an art project from Point B. Studio. http://memory.org/point.b/windmap.html