Interesting that there seem to be the plate tectonic versions of cyclones, like off Baja California.
Also, is the absence of data at the poles due to a coordinate system limitation?
There are two phenomena that look cyclonic.
The larger ones have to do with motion on a sphere: Euler showed that any velocity vector on a sphere can be represented as a rotation about a point (called an Euler pole); tectonic plates move basically rigidly, so the whole things rotate around a point. When that point is very close to (or within) the plate, the rotation is quite visible. You can see this in the Antarctic plate, halfway between Antarctica and Madagascar.
The second is an artifact of the vector visualization that Beccario used. The atmosphere is a continuum, so particles move smoothly between one location and another (more or less). But tectonic plates have rigid boundaries, and dive under each other or slide rigidly past one another. But the visualization algorithm doesn't know about these boundaries, so it creates particle paths that cross the boundaries and appear to swirl around. This probably happens to some degree in the mantle below the plates, but not really at the surface, with minor exceptions that I won't get into now unless people really want to nerd out on microplate rotation.
I'm not sure about the data gap at the poles. That's probably a real gap in the dataset I used; I haven't looked into it.
Right now is especially fascinating because the Euro and GFS models have recently begun to agree on the storm re-forming into a hurricane in a couple of days off the New Jersey coast. It's a fascinating time to watch wind patterns in the US right now!
Edit: Another really interesting tool is the Total Precipitable Water product: http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mimic-tpw/natl/main.ht...
Another example from July 2014: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/07/14/1500Z/wind/isobaric...
Conversely, you can see how the "heat dome" of this summer smothered almost the entirety of the contiguous United States, except for the West Coast in general and the Pacific Northwest in particular: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/07/22/1500Z/wind/isobaric...
It doesn't look like the other storms, in Hawaii and Florida. I wonder if these are normal conditions for that ridge?
Be sure to click the menu, and browse the chemical pollution or particulate data, and the alternative projections. XKCD fans will be pleased :-D
I use somewhat similar app for android made by Croatian Ministry of Maritime Affairs, Transport and Infrastructure https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hr.mppi.nis&ah... There's also iOS version https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nautical-info-service-croati...
Really handy when you're out there.
And yes, this is pretty necessary (at least it's quite hard to work around). To maintain the same view during viewport movement, it would have to keep track of all the particle trails in lat/long space and re-project them all to the new view. But this is implemented in canvas, so the trails (ie. particle histories) are likely not stored in their entirety - more likely, the system keeps track of only the particle's current position, and the trails are accomplished by drawing new line segments over the old on each frame. Yes, it would be technically possible to keep track of each particle's full history, and to re-project them all during interaction, but it would be pretty slow.
(I didn't make this, but I've written a very similar particle system in canvas and ran into similar issues)
It shows over 300F in the middle of it.
9.98° N, 149.27° W
360° @ 88 km/h
The location of this data point on the earth's surface is 9.8 degrees North Latitude, 149.27 degrees West longitude[0]. Wind direction is 360 azimuth degrees(meaning it's coming from straight north at that point sampled[1]) at a speed of 88 km/h.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system
Oh and that's wind speed not temp. In K/h.
Edit: actually the degrees you are seeing is the wind direction.