Central Park Weather Monitor

This Processing sketch pulls in the NOAA weather XML feed for Central Park. It was a bit more interesting to see in the heat of Hurricane Sandy on Monday, when I built the sketch.

The darkness of the Central Park photo is dependent on the temperature–the higher the temp the brighter the image. The number of circles over the image represents clouds which is the humidity reading. The movement of the circles is determined by the wind direction and speed.

What was unexpected is that the data in NOAA’s feed varies quite a lot — in this screenshot there was no wind-reading available; at another time I checked, wind speed was available but wind gust MPH was not; also wind direction is sometimes not just North, South, East, West, but “Variable”. In the days since first writing, I’ve tweaked the code a bit to accomodate for these inconsistencies.

Video of the visualization on a day with gentle wind breeze:

Example when wind data is not available:

See Processing Code

The sketch is based on this example by Daniel Schiffman, from his Learning Processing book.