Watching the weather is pretty much an all-year pastime for people in Britain. But thanks to the technological wonder of satellites, YouTube, time-lapse editing and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meterological Satellites, that process just became a lot more efficient.
EUMETSAT is a pan-European agency which takes responsibility for helping to launch and maintain many of the continent's satellites, and in doing so gather weather and climate data and deliver them around the world. The data specifically helps EUMETSAT deliver warnings to emergency services, and can help mitigate severe weather disasters including storms and flooding.
Naturally that means they have a lot of information about what the weather was like last year -- hot and wet, generally speaking -- and they have now helpfully combined it all into one, eight-minute video that shows the entire global weather system in 2015. The visualisation, above, comprises satellite data gathered with infrared satellites and superimposes it above Nasa's Blue Marble map of Earth, which changes with the seasons. The data also includes information gathered by NOAA (US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the JMA (Japan Meteorological Agency).
Mark Higgins, Training Manager at EUMETSAT, commentates the video. "One of the challenges of meteorological forecasting is to make people aware of what's coming appropriately," he says, as the video approaches winter and shows several storms hurtling into the UK. "The UK and Ireland worked in 2015 to name storms, in part to warn people of significant storms as they are coming," he continues, as Storm Abigail, Barney, Clodagh, Desmond and Eve barrel into the British Isles in the animation.
Sadly it would appear that the weather systems affecting more or less the entire globe will continue to be disrupted and violent over the coming year -- so as you're being pummelled by rain, snow and ice, or baked in the hot summer sun later in 2016, at least you can take some small solace in knowing it will make for another interesting EUMETSAT video in about six months' time.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
