Tens of thousands of fine streaks tracing the world's surface winds across a near-black oval map with no coastlines. Broad pink fans sweep west and towards the equator over the tropical Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, a ragged pink band circles the Southern Ocean, and the continents show only as dark, stippled quiet. A few small patches are blue.
Mean surface wind, 1979–2022, from ERA5. Pink where it has strengthened, blue where it has weakened, grey where neither is significant.

Something new, not ready to show yet. It started as a question — where in the world are the tall coastal dunes, and when does the wind blow square onto them? — and has grown a map, twenty thousand candidate sites scored against sixteen years of hourly reanalysis, and weather stations to keep the model honest.

Today it got a global wind layer, and this is that layer with everything else taken away: forty-four years of mean surface wind, drawn as streaks. Length is speed and brightness is how steady the direction is, which is why the trade-wind belts carry the picture and the continents show up only as quiet. No coastline is drawn.

The colour is the trend. Across the trade-wind belts the mean wind has picked up by about 0.14 knots a decade. A third of those cells have strengthened significantly, and not one has weakened.