Have you ever wondered where the weather comes from? Sure you did!
Oh, I do not mean that everybody is investing their time and effort into studying meteorology (however some really are), but there are many people that are simply curious about what's around them – and the weather is surely around and all the time. But even if you do not have time or mood for being curious, you may be surprised from time to time with what happens outdoors. It may be something like one really freezing day followed by a warm period, as it has been at my place not long ago or even a snow in July as it happens in the mountains. It means that you have some expectations of how the weather should behave, hidden inside.
Of course, we are being educated one way or the other. Some of us react well on school education and remember what we were taught in our young years, but not so many of us, as it is quite difficult to imagine the weather on a blackboard or in schoolbook words. Some prefer self-education, which unfortunately means more books and diagrams. The majority is probably continually hearing the weather reports, with attention or unwillingly, where someone describes low or high pressure regions, fronts, wet or dry air masses and things alike, convincing us that he knows what he is talking about.
It always seemed a bit abstract to me and really too static, drawn with cartographic symbols on the screens, arbitrarily appearing here and there. At least it was giving a clue what to expect and what's important, but it wasn't the weather itself.
The problem, you know, is in its movement and scale. Weather starts in every stone, field or building radiating and absorbing heat, and in the air flowing around it, taking and giving back the warmth and moisture. It never stops, constantly interacting with other and another things, going out of our sight and coming from the places we don't know. It goes high up to the stratosphere and far away to other continents. This is the reason why it's that hard to predict what it will do, as we can feel only the part which have a close contact with us.
Fortunately, what comes to our aid, is that nowadays we have access to the multiple eyes in the sky, watching everything for us and seeing the invisible things around the globe all the time. Forgive me the fun of these grandiloquent words – what I mean is great visualization made by Cameron Beccario (with help of the many, I suppose) that is available at https://earth.nullschool.net webpage. It shows real, current (as well as a bit of future) movement of all the atmosphere and oceans. Looking at it in the Earth scale or just some region, we can really picture it as a river of air flowing constantly around the globe, with its whirls and twirls. It really has no end or a beginning and carries warmth, water and whatever else it takes from one place to another.
Sometimes I just wonder, if (or when) we will be able to picture other things like that. What is also (or even more) interesting and probably also that complicated is the world of people. We are all around the globe and we constantly interact with each other, passing knowledge as well as emotions to each other, which influences us and makes us more or less the global community. And it changes all the time. It gets complicated even on the local scale, in a city or a company, which makes human resources specialists seen quite important these times. It gets really unpredictable on a global scale making all of us more or less worried or intrigued. But the problem is that we can really feel only the part which have a close contact with us.
What would make it possible to picture societies in reality are such eyes that could see all of us and see the important things about us. That's what we are trying to make available at Hypersoft and show in still very local way in Omnicontext Analytics. It's a long way to get global, but maybe sooner or later we will be able to really picture ourselves and see the weather.