A few days ago I came across an animated GIF on Twitter that showed all of the world's air traffic in a time-lapse format in just a few seconds.
Intrigued, I wanted to go back to the source to find where this GIF came from… it is actually a video of about a minute published a few years ago (2010 to be exact) by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)!
So this video shows 24 hours of air traffic over the earth with a Mercator projectionThe data used tracks all commercial flights originating from the 9000 airports worldwide. Each yellow dot represents an aircraft.
Thanks to the day/night reference, we realize that air traffic becomes denser when day breaks and reduces when night falls. Relatively logical, but we see it very clearly.
This video is very impressive especially if we imagine that it does not take into account all flights other than commercial flights (military in particular).
To fully enjoy it, don't hesitate to put it in full screen... and to save a little time, you can speed up the video by clicking on the little cogwheel at the bottom right!
Article updated on May 20, 2021 by Byothe
