Weather Map

http://www.xmwxweather.com/xmwx-data/data-products.html

Weather maps come in many different forms.  This particular weather map is a Surface Analysis Weather Map and is probably the most familiar type of weather map to the general public.  A Surface Analysis Weather Map displays current weather conditions at ground level (or on the surface, as the name indicates).  This particular shows the high and low pressure systems at the earth's surface.  The fronts indicate direction of movement (through the use of the arrows of the front) as well as whether they are cold (blue) or warm (red) fronts.

Waldseemuller Map

http://dnn.epcc.edu/Default.aspx?alias=dnn.epcc.edu/facultywebpages/nlove

The Waldseemuller Map is a wall map of the world and is named after its creator, German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller.  Since this map is "inspired by" the Ptolemaic map projection, it bears a strong resemblance to the Ptolemaic map.  Waldseemuller's map was published in April of 1507 and its claim to fame is that it is the first known map to use the term "America" in reference to the New World.  (This particular image was found on Professor Norman Love's web page for El Paso Community College.)

Windrose

http://gis1.drr.go.th/include/jpgraph-3.0.7/docportal/chunkhtml/ch21s02.html

The Wind Rose shows the relative frequency of wind direction.  The chart is a 16 point compass with the directions of north, east, south and west falling in a clockwise direction.  It appears that each ring on this chart represents a frequency of 10% of the total.  The color bars represent the frequency of wind speed.  The length of the bars represents percentage of time of the particular the wind speeds (in knots) in the specific directions.  

Upside Down Map

http://qablog.practitest.com/2010/06/4-practical-tips-for-testing-your-application-in-a-new-light/

This is the Upside Down Map.  There is no official explanation of/for this map other than it is a map of the world drawn from a different perspective.  Since we are so used to seeing maps from one perspective, when that perspective is altered, it makes it harder to comprehend.  Despite the fact that all the "shapes" of the land masses are the same, it took some time to find the United States because it seemed to be oriented incorrectly (in my mind.)

T O Map

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/images/maps/decworld/histmaps.php

This is a T O Map.  This map gets its name from its appearance--it looks like a T inside an O--and evolved during the Middle Ages.  The circle was a representation of the known universe while the T divided the world into the three known continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa).  The top of the map points east (in contrast to maps today that are usually oriented to the north).  The portion above the horizontal line of the T represents Asia, while Europe is on the left and Africa is on the right of the vertical line of the T.  The T represents the waterways (Black and Aegean Sea, Nile and Red Sea, and Mediterranean Sea) while the circle represented the oceans surrounding the continent. 

Textual Visualization

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/02/bigspy_digg_visualization.html

This is a Textual Visualization.  There are many different types of textual visualization, but this would be classified as a "Tag Cloud" where a list of words or phrases are sorted by some measure of relevance.  For this particular visualization, stories on the website Digg are placed at the top as they are "dugg."  The number in red represents the number of times the story has been dugg as new stories rise to the top.  As is apparent, the more "diggs" a story gets, the larger the text appears.

Triangular Plot

http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20050407-it_doesnt_matter_how_you_vote_either_way_your_planet_is_doomed.html

Also known as the Ternary Plot, the Triangular Plot is a graphical representation of three variables as positions in an equilateral triangle.  The proportions of the variables always total to some constant      (a + b + c = K).  Any one variable is not independent of the others, so only two variables must be known.  Although most triangular plots are seen in physical sciences such as geology, the creator of this plot used the chart to visually represent the probable outcome of an election based on recent (at the time) opinion polls.