Though the scarf moves serenely here and is easy for us to relate to, in reality, the winds are incredibly strong, and when they get up to 60km per hour, any snowman would be blown away!

A Katabatic wind is a wind that flows downhill. Also known as fall winds, katabatic winds are usually caused by gravity pulling higher density air downslope to lower density air.

Bonus: Winds that flow uphill are called Anabatic Winds. 

Antarctica is the coldest place on earth. It is also the windiest, driest, and highest continent. Wind speeds on the continent often exceed 100 mph each winter (160kmph).

Cape Denison along Commonwealth Bay in Antarctica has the highest average annual wind speed in the world: 44 mph (38 knots). Winds above 100 mph are not unusual in Antarctica. 

Airflow from high pressure, cold, elevated plains down wards to warmer, lower elevations with less pressure.

The wind is responsible for displacing loose snow, creating whiteout conditions and severe wind-chill.

Cusp Art Studio has created some code that connects the animation you see to Antarctic wind speed. We do this through the MetService Point Forecast API, which stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs are a connection between different software programs, and allow data to be shared. In this case, we’re using live weather data (wind speed) to control how fast the snowman's scarf moves. The higher the wind speed, the faster the scarf waves!

The MetService Point Forecast API updates windspeed from Antarctica around once an hour, so what you’re seeing is based on that hourly reading. There are other weather data providers that we could plug into that offer a minute to minute frequency, but it’s very expensive! 

Bonus: the number of times the data is updated is called “temporal frequency”. The International Systems of Units measure this in Hertz, named after the German physicist Heinrich Hertz who proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves (radio waves). Which paved the way for numerous advances in communication technology.