a million particles, one real NOAA wind snapshot
one fixed forecast hour · not a live feed
About a million particles pushed through one real hour of NOAA wind, in the browser with WebGPU.
NOAA GFS, the US National Weather Service global forecast. One 6-hourly cycle of 10 m wind, the eastward and northward components, regridded to 360 by 180. Public domain. The exact forecast time is in the panel.
A short Python script pulls a GRIB2 subset from NOAA NOMADS, packs u into the red channel and v into green of one small PNG, and stores the value ranges and cycle time next to it.
Natural Earth 1:110m coastline, also public domain, so you can tell where you are.
Particle positions live in a GPU buffer. A hand-written WGSL compute shader samples the wind under each particle and steps it forward, respawning strays so the field stays even. Trails build up in a floating-point buffer that fades each frame, then a tonemap keeps the fastest winds from clipping to white.
This is one fixed forecast hour, not a live feed. Re-running the script refreshes it to the latest cycle.