The eye of hurricane Matthew passes directly over a weather buoy

[gilgoomesh]

That's a beautiful graph but NOAA's insistence on non-metric units frustrates me endlessly. Knots for speed are bad enough but "inches" for pressure is multiple levels of wrong.

[psherman]

You can switch to the metric system on their website [1]. The graph can also be switched to metric by changing the "uom" query parameter from "E" to "M"

[1] http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=42058&unit...

[Justin_K]

FYI a Knot is standard for navigation world wide because the unit is standardized on earth's size. 1kt = 1 nautical mile per hour. 1 nautical mile = one minute of Earth's longitude. Learned this in sailing class :)

Wikipedia: "Worldwide, the knot is used in meteorology, and in maritime and air navigation—for example, a vessel travelling at 1 knot along a meridian travels approximately one minute of geographic latitude in one hour."

[jordanb]

Knots are much more useful for the primary consumers of this data: mariners. Knots are a global standard for measuring speed at sea. And virtually every weather bureau reports windspeeds in knots or Beaufort scale in their maritime reports with the notable exception being the French who insist using meters/second.

inHg measures are used in aviation btw, but yeah it's less ideal for a maritime report: mariners use millibars for pressure.

[leohutson]

Try:

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=42058&meas=wd...

[niccaluim]

I like metric as much as the next guy but you can pry knots from my cold, dead hands.

Sincerely,

An aviator and sailor

[hudibras]

One of the few things I remember from my 20-year-old meteorology degree is that 1 meter/second is very close to 2 knots. This conversion was also useful when I was in the Navy, especially for coming alongside piers or other ships.

[redwood]

I think it's a nice quirk to be honest, keeps us on our toes doing more math (good for our brains). I think it's interesting that we champion diverse languages and cultures but balk when distinct measurement systems with their own quirks are used. Even though the metric system has plenty of brilliance to it, each has its own forms of human intuition backed in. And further, they're both completely arbitrary really.

[jonathansizz]

This could just be down to politics. As a government agency that studies climate and environmental issues, their very existence already has plenty of ideological opposition. So why risk alienating the public further by using a non-traditional measurement system?

[ared38]

What's more wrong about inches than knots?

[jjp]

Raw data is reported in different units and presentation in formats that the consumer might find useful - See http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/measdes.shtml for explanation of the raw data.

[EFruit]

iirc its inches of mercury, which isn't much more helpful. I've frequently seen it labeled as "in. hg"

[chadclan]

Some other neat data from the same buoy.

Wave height http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=42058&meas=wv...

Wind direction http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=42058&meas=wd...

Air temperature http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=42058&meas=at...

Water surface temperature http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=42058&meas=wt...

Dewpoint http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=42058&meas=de...

I just tried the data format codes from the link someone posted earlier http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/measdes.shtml

Cool stuff!

[josh_carterPDX]

Being a former QuarterMaster in the Navy, all of this is so fascinating. 20 years ago this data was not easily accessible to the public so you had to wait for some sort of published journal to come out to see this information. I love that we all have access to it so easily.

[prplhaz4]

Additionally, it is located in the Central Caribbean - 210 NM SSE of Kingston, Jamaica

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=42058

[dluan]

If anyone wants to see where it is, the hurricane's moved further up north away from the buoy's location.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/ort...

[harlanlewis]

That's a great visualization. Reminded me of one posted to hacker news a few weeks ago that let's you cycle through visualizations of cloud cover, atmospheric pressure, precipitation etc in addition to wind:

https://www.windyty.com/?20.551,-74.487,5

I really love seeing all these conditions moving in concert at a global scale. As someone who's never experienced a hurricane, it makes the effects feel much less abstract.

[losteverything]

What is this site about?

[jpalomaki]

I was surprised some time ago when I found out that the modern wind speed measuring devices work without moving parts. I had expected them to all have these spinning ping pong ball halves.

To do it without moving parts, they are for using for example ultrasound. These devices have pairs on transducers, placed 10-20cm apart and the device then measures how long it takes for the sound to pass through that distance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemometer#Ultrasonic_anemomet...

[swehner]

Does a speaker count as a moving part?

[matwood]

Being in the eye of a hurricane is an odd feeling. Growing up I went through Hugo, and when the eye finally passed over, it went from chaos to an eerie dead calm. We went outside and to see the destruction, but knew there was not much we could do yet. A tree had clipped the corner of the house so my parents did what they could do to protect the exposed inside against the rain of back half of the storm. Beyond that, we just prepared hold tight for another few hours.

[chiph]

I lived near Charlotte during Hugo. The thing I remember most is going out afterwards and smelling all the pine sap (smells like the Pine Sol cleanser) from all the downed trees.

IIRC, the storm depressed the market for lumber for a year or more afterwards, as it was flooded with wood cut from the trees that were uprooted and then harvested.

[isomorphic]

One of the things I take away from this graph isn't just the peak wind speed, but the amount of time you'd be under hurricane-force winds.

A couple minutes of 90mph winds is one thing... hours of 90mph winds is entirely another thing.

[bhrgunatha]

Of course it depends on how fast the system is moving and how much area it covers.

I've been kept up all night with the noise caused by the high winds, particularly when it is gusting. The sound of the wind and all the banging and clattering of scrap being tossed around, doors and windows rattling and slamming, car alarms and so on.

The sound of the wind when it reaches its peak is equally awe inspiring and terrifying.

I've only experienced one eye and it is quite surreal. Screaming winds start to drop and it becomes eerily quiet and calm for (in this case) a couple of hours. Then the chaos and fury start to ramp up again.

[dredmorbius]

It's not so much the wind as what is in the wind that really bowls you over.

[avs733]

I would be immensely curious to see the raw data given how the point spacing changes (assuming those aren't actual data measurements). The drop and recovery around the eye are so staggeringly smooth.

[sathackr]

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_realtime.php?station=42058

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/hourly2/

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/hourly2/hour_01.cwind

I love the ndbc site, have been using it for 10+ years now

[Taek]

They are most likely smooth because there are so few data points. The red line has the peak, one data point halfway down, one at the bottom, one halfway up, and then the next peak. 'halfway' could be anywhere between 20% and 80% and it'd still look like a super smooth line.

Air pressure is less bad, but each data point is still moving a huge amount. If there was a lot of variance we'd have difficulties setting it at this resolution.

[sathackr]

Wonder why we don't see winds at the reported speeds(130mph+) in the data?

Maybe it's a limit of the measuring device?

[cr1895]

It could be a number of things:

- the max gust didn't occur at the buoy;

- the reported wind speed is a 10-min/1-hr mean or some other variation that wouldn't show the peak gust;

I really doubt that it's a limitation of the sensor.

[VLM]

Check out

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutwindprofile.shtml

In summary the peak is highly variable for every storm but is usually somewhere around 500-1000 feet above ground level.

Its not irrelevant that its so high off the ground ... a tree thats uprooted, picked up to 500 feet, accelerated to 150 MPH, and dropped on you might land on you in merely 100 MPH winds, but it'll still be flying at 150 MPH (maybe faster?)

Note there are plenty of broadcast transmitter towers where the top will get winds 50 MPH faster than the surface. 500 feet is only maybe 50 stories for a tall building. So there is some impact directly on the largest constructed things.

"How come the 150 MPH rated water tower survived but the 160 MPH radio antenna next to it collapsed?" well the water tower was in 130 MPH winds and the antenna was in 180 MPH winds at the same time so ...

[webkike]

I love this graph

[dandelany]

Call me a cynic, but my first thought on looking at this was "we can't do any better than a datum per hour?!" :) Must be a bandwidth constraint.

[cr1895]

At least with regard to significant wave height (rather, describing the sea conditions):

It's more useful to describe a "sea state" which is made up of infinitely many frequencies, directions, etc. than to have a timeseries of wave elevation at a given point. A snapshot of the overall sea conditions for a given time, if you will.

Sea states can be well described by a couple statistical parameters, namely significant wave height (Hs), peak wave period (Tp), and peak wave direction. There are other refining parameters such as the directional spread but Hs, Tp, and direction are quite informative.

[lorenzhs]

Here's a wind speed plot with a data point every ten minutes: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/show_plot.php?station=42058&meas=sp...

I prefer the hourly binned one. It's much cleaner.

Just because the chosen visualisation doesn't have the accuracy you like doesn't mean that the data isn't there.

[Zikes]

Call me an optimist, but the data may have been binned by hour.

[sp527]

It's biuriful tears up

And now back to our regularly scheduled React component.