How often do you check the weather? Once a day? Twice? Do you complain when the forecast is inaccurate? Do you think that “your phone is stupid” when it inaccurately reports rain when it is just cloudy outside? Do you ever wonder how your weather app knows what is happening outside? Do you ever marvel that you can find out the current weather in any corner of the world right now?
Until recently, like most modern humans, every morning, on my phone I would pull up a weather app to make some basic decisions about my day: “can I go for a run outside?”, “Do I need an umbrella?”. When I have something important (a trip, an event) I would check it multiple times. Like hitting refresh will help to change the weather forecast to the desired outcome (yes, that day when I was planning to wear new velour shoes and it was pouring rain).
But when I started taking pilot classes, the weather status “about 15C and overcast” was not enough for my daily decision making. On my ‘flying days’ I need to know not just the temperature but also the dew point, pressure (sea level and airport), humidity, visibility, wind direction, wind strength. Until recently these atmospheric properties have not been significant in my decision making - now they were dictating everything from aeroplane performance to the active runway. I have discovered for myself the terms like METAR, SIGMET, AIRMET, isocurves, ATIS, AWOS, ISA. Sure I have learned about some of them in the geography classes, but there is a difference in learning something to pass the test versus to learn something because your life depends on it. (Another case in point for high involvement in decision making.
Another interesting thing that I never thought about is how “apolitical” is the weather. There are big countries who have huge weather research agencies and send multiple satellites that orbit the earth(GEOs and LEOs)^1, and countries that don’t have any satellites. Regardless of political geography, I can look up that right now is 24C in Shanghai and 13 in Kuala Lampur. Since we are sanitized with information availability it might not impress you, but think about it for a second - you don’t need a country permission to know what is the weather there. Global weather services are probably one of the best examples of the shared commonwealth of human knowledge: open and free to use by everyone. The United Nations agency responsible for (among other duties) for coordinating weather observations is the World Meteorological Organization. Regional Basic Synoptic Network consists around 4,400 surface stations around the world.
Another remarkable thing about current human weather monitoring is the fact that weather models (including forecasting algorithms) are not assembled in secret by a corporation but out in the open, collaboratively amount scientists and government agencies from all around the world, albeit so slowly that their construction and sophistication has mostly gone unnoticed. Pardon my excitement - but such beautiful human collaboration it almost utopian.
In the mid 18th century to know the weather outside (just in your immediate surroundings”) you needed a very expensive thermometer. But you would nobly be able to measure temperature - what about wind, pressure, humidity you will need additional instruments. And if you have measured all of them, you did not have data to make a forecast of what will happen in a couple of hours other than your experience and intuition. With the invention of the printing press, you could read in your morning newspaper someone else’s thermometer measurements and interpretations. As we have created a large weather data collection network, came TV meteorologists would stand in front of the maps to give a twist on now more robust data stream. Today in 2 phone taps you can get current weather status or a forecast for the next 7 days around any point in the world, for free. As we are sanitized with easy information access, I wonder if we lost the ability to marvel. And marvel we should at what seems a banal daily activity, cause it almost must be true magic.
> When we look at the forecast for tomorrow we often forget(if we ever knew) that someone’s job to look at the sky there
^1 GEO- geostatetionary satellite that orbits in the same direction as the erth’s rotation, making them appear motionless in the sky. LEO - the polar or low earth orbiters, fly low and fast and circle the planet from north to south, overflying a different geography with each orbit.
Further reading:
I have stumbled - ver nicely written piece to impress you and put things in perspective: “ The Weather Machine” by Andrew Blum
It is hard to remember that data visualizations are not the modern invention forced by data explosion in 2010th, but an intuitive method to display multiple complex ideas at the same time or distil patterns. To remind us of the vintage display of Stanford University published online exhibit of Vintage Data Vizualization. Some of the pieces strikingly showcase how these visualization shape the way we perceive the world. For example, the early charts of events have introduced left to right timeline and frame how humans perceive time chronologically and linearly. Similarly, clock shapes our perception of cyclical days and calendar shapes our perception of seasonality. The regions that don’t have seasonality ( near the equator) the perception of time is more slowed down and less accentuated. While visiting Cuenca, Ecuador, known as ‘the city of eternal spring’ a lot of residents have reported a more dissolved perception of time - years fly by and it’s hard to notice since the perception of time is not demarcated with seasonal changes.
Another example of how data visualization shaped our perception is a comparative view. Early visualizations of mountain ranges allowed us to take objects out of their context (a mountain from Switzerland and a mountain from the Himalayas) and place them into same space for relative comparison. Without the usage of pen and paper and the exact measurement it is not possible even if you have experienced the object in both respective environments( you have been to both Switzerland and Himalayas, both have high mountains, but how high exactly?).
One of the most interesting visualizations in the exhibit is “The Temple Of Time’ by Emma Vuillard. This visualisation mimics personal reference bias - the past recedes in the background while the present is very clear. I find this way of showing history very imaginative and have not seen more contemporary replicas. I guess time to make one.
In 2017 in an effort to better unite space and time parameters Mapbox has created a new type of chart that was a map combined with timestamps, but without linearity of time. While this type of data visualization has not caught up yet, I think that emergence of interactive articles on the web will make full use of this more intuitive invention. And yet again will change the way we perceive things.
In May 2019 humans have installed the highest weather station near the summit of mt. Everest at 27,600 feet above sea level. Pause. Let this fact sink in -only in 1953 humans managed to reach the summit for the first time - a thought that was inconceivable. Sixty years later not only we annually climb it in hundreds, but we also have installed close to the summit a very complex piece of machinery that sends data daily about temperature, humidity, pressure, and winds. Another marvel - the data is publicly available for [the fast 5 days] and accessible by anyone with internet access. Let me repeat - you can now find out what’s the weather is like on top of Everest right now from the convenience of your living room no matter which country you are based in. It is fully self-contained and powered through solar power. National Geographic provides a detailed account of their expedition. As I am typing this the temperatures vary from -17C to -12C. Sometimes the rate of progress truly amazes me.
