Earth is an interactive web-based platform for visualizing global weather, ocean, and atmospheric data. It animates particle flows representing wind, ocean currents, and waves on a customizable map, and supports overlaying color-coded meteorological, oceanographic, chemical, and particulate data for detailed analysis.
The platform distinguishes itself by offering multiple cartographic projections—including orthographic, equirectangular, and stereographic—that can be switched to view global patterns from different perspectives. It also provides keyboard-driven navigation, allowing map rotation, zoom, time stepping, and layer toggling entirely through single-key shortcuts. Users can explore data at different atmospheric pressure levels, browse historical weather data from archived model runs, and toggle between earth system modes covering atmosphere, ocean, chemistry, particulates, space weather, and biology.
Additional capabilities include displaying active fire detections from satellite data, visualizing ocean surface currents, and overlaying environmental data layers such as temperature, humidity, pressure, precipitation, and chemical concentrations. The interface supports unit conversion for meteorological variables and offers controls for customizing map appearance, text size, and interpolation method. Data is sourced from the Global Forecast System model and rendered through tile-based compositing and GPU-accelerated particle animation.