KIRAKU

KIRAKU is a visual-first meteorology education app. It helps you see how the atmosphere, weather, and climate actually work.

This is the 19th title in a science-learning series that already covers mathematics, physics, electricity, waves, thermodynamics, astronomy, optics, quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics, probability, geometry, chemistry, microbiology, neuroscience, mechanical engineering, geology, genetics, and oceanography. KIRAKU's theme is meteorology. Nine carefully designed simulations cover the essentials from high-school earth science to introductory university meteorology.

[Nine Simulations]

- General Circulation
Visualize the three-cell model (Hadley, Ferrel, Polar) on a globe. Six surface wind belts — trade winds, westerlies, and polar easterlies — are bent by the Coriolis force and shown as color-coded particle flows.

- Atmospheric Profile
Temperature and pressure across the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere. Curves follow the US Standard Atmosphere, with an altitude cursor for reading temperature and pressure at any height.

- Cloud Formation
How rising moist air cools adiabatically, hits its dew point, and condenses. The contrast between the dry lapse rate (9.8 C/km) and the moist lapse rate (~6 C/km) governs cloud growth, with all ten standard genera explained.

- Cyclones and Fronts
How cold and warm air masses meet to form warm, cold, and occluded fronts inside an extratropical cyclone, with the strong updrafts that drive most of the precipitation.

- Typhoon Structure
Tropical cyclones develop over seas above 26.5 C. See the calm eye, the violent eyewall, and the spiral driven by the Coriolis force, plus the maximum-wind categories.

- Precipitation
How cloud droplets (~10 micrometers) grow into raindrops (~1 millimeter) through warm rain (collision-coalescence) and cold rain (the Bergeron process). Temperature and updraft strength decide whether snow, rain, sleet, or hail falls.

- Radar and Satellite
How weather radar maps rainfall from echo intensity and wind from the Doppler shift, and how visible and infrared satellite imagery classify clouds by brightness and cloud-top temperature.

- Jet Stream
The strong upper-tropospheric westerlies and the Rossby-wave meanders that drive daily weather, plus blocking patterns that trigger extreme events and reshape aircraft routes.

- El Nino / La Nina
The Pacific climate seesaw — how trade-wind strength shifts the equatorial warm pool east or west on multi-year timescales, and how that propagates into global rainfall, temperature, and extreme weather.

[Highlights]
- Every simulation ships with an Info sheet covering the underlying physics
- Real, textbook-grade concepts: general circulation, lapse rates, geostrophy, cyclone dynamics, ENSO
- Japanese and English UI
- Dark and light themes
- Clean, distraction-free interface

[Best for]
- Students in earth science or introductory meteorology
- Anyone curious about how weather and climate really work
- Teachers looking for visual classroom material
- News-savvy readers who want to understand climate change, severe weather, and typhoons