NASA's Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio gives us this amazing animation of ocean currents around the globe, Perpetual Ocean.
It pairs well with this Wind Map animation showing wind speeds across the U.S., which is intended more as an artistic project than a scientific tool but still feels insightful in a scientific way.
Your first thought upon looking at them might be about weather forecasting, but together they remind me of a piece I read recently about solar forecasting (I don't know anything about this source, I'm just saying the subject matter was interesting).