For the visualization above, I focused on 4 buoys in the path of Hurricane Sandy reporting wind speed and direction. Each colored line represents an individual buoy, and the path of the line is determined by the wind speed and wind direction between early October through mid November.
To see this draw "etch-a-sketch" style, check out this video.
For this visualization above, each horizontal strip represents one buoy. There are 38 strips, so 38 buoys represented. These are the same buoys from the visualization below. This visualization represents the year of 2012—chronologically from left to right—one sample for every hour of the year. This time I'm using three sets of data for each buoy—wave height, wind speed, and atmospheric pressure. Each data set is assigned one color channel (red, green, and blue) which makes up the final color palette.
Above, is a visualization of wave heights across 38 buoys in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico in 2012, using data from ndbc.noaa.gov/.