As folks start getting back on the water, and teams look to begin racing in the next 30 days or so, athletes and coaches are turning their minds from erg splits back to currents, tides and of course, wind.

We found this cool wind map online; a collaboration of Google data visualization engineers and artists Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, the map updates hourly with data from the National Digital Forecast Database, and shows a visual representation of wind speeds and directions in the whole US.  (The map is zoomable too, which is a bonus).

Conceivably, you could look at this map and roughly predict what everyone's racing weekend is going to be like...usually there are definitely some better places to race, and some definitely worse.

h/t hint.fm