Visualizing Ocean Currents

This is a beautiful representation of ocean currents around the world:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/7009056027/

Put together by the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, this short video circles the digital globe, showing the relative strengths and directions of ocean movement.

Watching this allows one to see some of the basic mathematics of fluid flow, like tendency toward rotation and how fluid behaves at boundaries.  In addition, global phenomena like the jet stream and trade winds can also be perceived.

This dynamic representation of data is similar to this wind map in how it brings to life the ideas of vector fields and flow lines.