Where Will All the Oil in the Gulf End Up?

When the Deepwater Horizon well exploded in April 2010, scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research to create dozens of models of how the oil might disperse across the Gulf. While the NCAR researchers were generous in sharing their data, there was a major problem of translation: Each scenario consisted of 5 GB of data stored in an academic format called netCDF, which isn't very convenient for a publication that doesn't want its readers to have to wait six hours to load an article.

Fortunately, I was able to load NCAR's data with a program called Ncview, running on an old office computer that had been converted into a Linux machine. This program could output each day's image of the oil model as a PNG file, which was then loaded into Flash.