Very Cool Great Lakes Surface Currents Visualization

My colleague and internet friend Dave Gunderson posted a link to this story on some pretty sweet new visualizations of Great Lakes surface currents by a group of artists and technologists that had previously done this with wind observations across the US. This is just a snapshot -- their lab hosts the dynamic visualization that you can also zoom for better detail. The artists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, worked with the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory to build these new visualizations using their existing wind-oriented code.

Great Lakes surface currents around the afternoon of 3 October 2012, from Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg via OurAmazingPlanet.

The earlier version of that visualization has been very cool to look at during major weather events, such as landfalling hurricanes. They've stored some dynamic snapshots of these in a gallery for visitors to look at these events.

Visualized wind currents over the continental US on the evening of 29 October 2012, around the time Hurricane Sandy made landfall,
from Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg.

Check these out! I think this would be awesome for small-scale visualization of currents in a river, or using a DEM to calculate the flow of water from rainfall to runoff to streams through a watershed. I could sit and stare at these for hours...