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Animated weather map attracts new viewers with ‘Jabba the Hutt’ post

Some looks for shapes in the clouds — others, in weather maps.

An animated map depicting global weather conditions, earth.nullschool.net, inadvertently caught a lot of attention after producing a series of images of our planet that kind of resembles a Muppet.

Cameron Beccario, who lives in Tokyo, posted an image of the upper-level wind map to his social media pages earlier this week.

“Earth is not amused,” Beccario wrote in the initial post.  But others were amused.

Several people joked that it looked like Oscar the Grouch from “Sesame Street” or Jabba the Hutt from “Star Wars.”

Some meteorologists started to share the image on Twitter.

Several outlets, including the Weather Network, jumped on the story, presumably as a way to catch the attention of people who might not otherwise pay attention to this sort of science.

The pink areas that resemble eyebrows represent the high-speed winds, and the eyes are “stationary vortices that are common during the winter months,” according to network meteorologist Tyler Hamilton.

Chris Dolce, a meteorologist for the Weather Channel, explained that the mouth is located along the the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where a convergence of the trade winds can cause intense rainfall.

Beccario uses data from the Global Forecast System to generate these maps, according to Slate magazine.