Live browser QA of the Wind layer surfaced several rendering defects that
unit tests with fakes did not catch:
- The trail fade used a translucent black fill (source-over), which raises
alpha instead of erasing; combined with additive strokes the overlay
saturated into a solid white disk. Fade with destination-out instead, and
draw strokes with normal blending.
- Particles were seeded uniformly over the whole globe, so at regional zoom
almost none fell on screen. Seed inside the camera's visible rectangle.
- A non-finite particle position (polar divide-by-zero) reached Cesium,
which threw and aborted the entire frame before any stroke. Guard finite
coordinates per particle and per projection.
- Exaggerate advection in proportion to camera height, so the same visual
speed is legible at street level and at hemispheric zoom.
- Brighter colour ramp (the old ramp started near-invisible dark grey) and a
defensive frame try/catch so one bad frame cannot kill the loop.
Verified: the wind field/colour/particle model renders the real GFS 06z field
correctly in an offline render, and the wind unit tests pass (8/8).
Add ECMWF IFS 10 m wind alongside NOAA GFS, selectable at runtime.
The /api/wind proxy becomes a model dispatcher: `?model=gfs|ifs` (default gfs,
unknown → 400), cached per model+cycle+grid. IFS reads the keyless ECMWF Open
Data JSON Lines `.index` (note: `<stem>.index`, not `<grib2>.index`), byte-range
fetches only the `10u`/`10v` messages, decodes them with the same ecCodes WASM
path, and resamples with the existing grid code (ECMWF grids start at lo1=180;
the resampler already wraps columns).
The client layer gains a `model` parameter (setParams/getParams) with a
generation guard so a model switch aborts and refetches exactly once. Registered
as an enabled+options layer with a `model` enum.
Validated end-to-end against the real 2026-09-14 06z IFS cycle on Node 25
(180x91 grid at 2°, 131,040-byte payload, plausible mean |u|/|v|), and GFS
still passes the same check.
Attribution: contains modified Copernicus/ECMWF IFS forecast data, licensed
under CC BY 4.0. Verified: npm test (3412 pass, 0 fail), check:boundaries.
Add a Wind layer animating the global 10 m wind field from NOAA GFS.
The /api/wind proxy selects the latest available 0.25° cycle, reads its .idx
inventory, byte-range fetches only the UGRD/VGRD 10 m GRIB2 messages (~1 MB
each instead of the whole ~500 MB file), decodes them with ecCodes (WASM),
resamples to a compact grid (1° default), and serves a manifest plus a Float32
U/V payload cached per cycle for an hour (single-flight, last-good on failure).
The client renders nullschool-style particles in a canvas overlay: bilinear
field sampling with longitude wrap, per-frame advection, Cesium camera
projection, and globe-occlusion culling via EllipsoidalOccluder.
Validated end-to-end against the real 2026-09-14 06z cycle on Node 25
(180x91 grid at 2°, 131,040-byte payload, plausible mean |u|/|v|). The WASM
decoder requires Node >=24, which the repo already requires.
Registered as `wind` (token k) with attribution and docs. Verified: npm test
(3412 pass, 0 fail), npm run check:boundaries.
Toggling datacenters, dams, or submarine cables off only set `show = false`
on their data sources. Cesium's DataSourceDisplay still walks every
visualizer of a hidden source each frame, and the ~11.5k hidden entities
(hundreds of MB) stayed resident, so the whole scene rendered ~2x slower
for the rest of the session after a single on/off round trip (owner field
test 2026-09-13).
disable() now removes the data sources from the viewer and drops the built
records; the parsed dataset (NDJSON features / TeleGeography JSON) is cached
so enable() rebuilds without a refetch or re-parse. A disable that lands
while a load is in flight releases the finished build instead of parking it
hidden. destroy() clears the cache.
Measured with a headful Chrome harness (flights+military+satellites on,
camera rotating, 250-frame windows), before -> after:
- entities resident after OFF: 11,537 -> 0
- DataSourceDisplay.update per frame after OFF: 1.09 ms -> 0.02 ms
- scene.render per frame after OFF: 13.9 ms (control 6.6 ms) -> 5.2 ms
(fresh baseline 5.0 ms in the same run)
- JS heap 30 s after OFF: 1.6 GB and climbing -> 342 MB after GC
Tests: the GeoJSON lifecycle and cables suites assert disable leaves zero
sources/contexts and re-enable rebuilds with fetch called once.
Gustavo Beneduzi