Why I Should Care
Because pictures like this one are FUN! WHEEEEEE! I'm at atmospheric scientist, which means that I like things like jet streams, and graphs like this one excite me. Yay!
This is a cross section of a particular day -- September 12, 2007, at 72 degrees west -- that shows temperature, in white, and westerly wind, in blue (easterly wind is in dashed blue). It goes from north pole to equator rather than the other way around, like the picture on the previous page. You can see that it's a lot more detailed, a lot stronger, and much more wavy-looking than the average over all time and all longitudes on the previous page. The jet stream is the dot at 50 m/s at the center of the figure. The white lines are lines of constant temperature, so you can follow one to the number legend and find out the temperature at any point. Notice that, while the aspect ratio is still not right -- that dot is at 12 km, and the horizontal size of this picture is 10,000 km -- the pressure numbers on the side are actually to scale. Notice the much smaller distance between 1000 mb and 850 mb, say, than between 250 mb and 100 mb, the same pressure difference. Also, notice the surface; the mountains are visible. By the way, what you're seeing isn't actually measured. Nobody has the capability to go to every point in space, or at least every point at 72 degrees west, and measure the pressure, temperature, and wind speed. There are only a few places where measurements happen, and models interpolate that data to come up with the best guess for what the entire 3-D atmosphere looks like. Mountains are very hard to deal with, and you can see evidence of that in the fact that the models didn't even try to guess what's happening near them; they essentially drew a box where the mountains are and worked around it.
Anyway, that's why I should care. Why YOU should care, well... Keep clicking!