The strongest winds on the planet when I took the above screen shot of the barometric layer of WeatherMap+ last evening are not obvious.  Even given the elongation of areas at high latitudes, the strongest low was also the smallest:  that archery target in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  It doesn’t really even show up fully on the wind layer.

I had to go to Living Earth’s view of cloud cover, where I found:

        I expect that Claudia is similar to the small, extremely deep low that south of Australia brought me and EGREGIOUS the greatest winds I’ve ever experienced, winds that I estimated to have been at least 100 knots.

        I study both WeatherMap+ and Living Earth every day.  In combination they provide a compellingly instructive view of the world’s weather.

         This morning Claudia’s wind strength has increased to 105 knots/120 mph and she is still moving slowly south.

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         The two photographers are Edward Curtis and Sebastiao Salgado.

        I first learned of Edward Curtis in a post last Thursday by Steve Earley which struck an immediate chord.  I clicked on the Amazon link and about a minute later had the book on my iPad.  (To me this continues to be amazing.) 

        While I usually read on a Kindle, I choose the iPad because its Retina screen is superior for images.  I’ve read about a third of the book and agree with Steve that Edward Curtis was a true original, an artist as well as a documenter of a vanishing people.

        It happened that on Saturday there was a link in THE OBSERVER to the most recent work of Brazilian photographer,  Sebastiao Salgado, of whom I knew, another man of original talent documenting a vanishing way of life.

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        LISTEN magazine always costs me money.  This time with an article about the string quartets of Joseph Haydn, two albums of which I then downloaded from iTunes.

        I listened to them while watching the Army/Navy football game Saturday afternoon with the television sound muted. 

        At one point a player’s name appeared on the screen.  I didn’t quite believe my eyes, so I googled Navy’s roster and found that, indeed, playing safety for the U. S. Naval Academy is Wave Ryder.  Perfect.