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NAThese rainbow swirls are ocean currents! 🌈🌊
Ocean currents move water, heat, carbon and nutrients around the globe, influencing Earth’s weather patterns, ecosystems, climate, fisheries, and more.
In this visualization, warmer currents are yellow and orange, while colder currents are purple or dark blue. The data come from NASA’s ECCO, a detailed model of Earth’s ocean that incorporates hundreds of millions of observations from satellites and floating ocean sensors.
Video description:
:00 Spinning globe with data overlaid showing ocean currents. The currents form squiggly lines, swirls, and circular eddies.
:17 The globe pauses spinning. An arrow points to bright yellow swirls along the southeastern coast of the U.S.
:24 The globe continues spinning.
:36 Close up view of the Gulf Stream current, yellow and orange lines that flow up and around the southern tip of Florida, then along the southeastern coast of the United States. The camera pulls back to show where the current originates in the tropics, then continues pulling back until one half of the globe is visible. The screen fades to black.
1:00 Another view of the globe. This one shows the Kuroshio, a current near southeastern Asia. The camera zooms in to show the current flowing past Taiwan and Japan.
1:08 Another view of the globe, now focusing on the southern tip of Africa. The Agulhas Current is shown, flowing down the southeastern side of Africa and around the tip, pinching off swirling circular ocean features that look like whirlpools.
#Earth #NASA #Ocean #Science #DataViz
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