Lake Tahoe Wind Vector and Streamline Animations
The UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center has 5 active nearshore and 4 NASA buoy meteorological stations in the Tahoe Basin as part of an ongoing lake monitoring program. The stations record wind speed, wind direction, precipitation, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, solar radiation and relative humidity. A cellular modem wirelessly transmits the data every 15 minutes to the cloud where it is publicly accessible. Using this data, UC Davis TERC created animated wind maps to show the real-time and past wind data through vector field and streamline maps. A vector map consists of arrows that change size and direction whereas a streamline map consists of thousands of points that simulate the movement of air particles. The program uses a weighted average interpolation to estimate wind speed and direction within areas that do not have a station to monitor wind speeds.