Why Weather?
Weather has always been one of the most visually dramatic domains in physics — and one of the hardest to simulate honestly. A tornado is multi-scale fluid dynamics; a rainbow is geometric optics of a droplet combined with wavelength-dependent refraction; a hurricane is a heat engine running on a warm ocean. Each of these deserved its own simulation.
This category also fills a gap I heard about often: meteorology is taught everywhere, but most visualisations are either static diagrams or TV-graphics quality animations you can't interact with. These sims let you change the inputs — sea surface temperature, wind shear, rainfall intensity — and watch the physics respond.
The Six New Simulations
Two more sims round out the category with deep-dive science:
- Hurricane Formation — an animated cross-section of a Category 4 storm: eye wall, spiral rain bands, storm surge, and rapid intensification driven by sea surface temperature. The companion article Hurricane Formation: Warm Oceans, Spiral Winds, and the Coriolis Force has the full physics including the Coriolis derivation and Saffir-Simpson scale.
- Wildfire Spread — cellular automaton + wind field driving a fire front across procedural terrain. Adjust humidity, wind speed, and vegetation density.
What Made These Hard
The tornado was the most technically involved. A real tornado spans three orders of magnitude in scale — core vortex width a few tens of metres, outer mesocyclone kilometres wide. Getting that feel in a fixed-scale WebGL scene required mocking the multi-scale nature with two nested particle systems: a tight inner spiral of fast-moving debris and a broader, slower outer envelope of condensation cloud.
The rainbow was deceptively tricky. The optical maths is straightforward (Snell's law, two internal reflections), but making it visually correct — accurate band width, correct angular position, the dark Alexander's band between primary and secondary — requires per-wavelength tracing across the visible spectrum from 380 nm to 700 nm, not just RGB.
All Weather & Atmosphere simulations are now live under /categories/weather/. The tornado and hurricane both have related deep-dive articles in the content library.
What's Next
Several more weather phenomena are in the pipeline: lightning discharge (leader propagation + return stroke), cloud formation (nucleation and droplet growth), and a global circulation model showing Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells. If you have a specific atmospheric phenomenon you'd like to see simulated, drop me a note.