Earlier this fall, I worked with Hyungmin Lee (University of Colorado) on creating a visualization of polar wind data from the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5. Here’s the result:
The top row depicts, in a polar stereographic projection, Northern Hemisphere wind data as a contour plot and as a vector plot, while the bottom row gives the same for the Southern Hemisphere.
You can download the code and data I used here [ZIP, 2 MB]. It took a little more code than I expected to get a good result, but it did give me some experience in using the LONGITUDES property of MAPGRID, which (along with the LATITUDES property) was introduced in IDL 8.2. I hope that you can use it as another example of using (New) Graphics in IDL.
Note: I’m out next week, but I’ll be back on Thu Jan 3 with an update on Drew Slater’s Colorado snow map site.

What is your purpose in setting the Transparency keyword on these plot? I can see that it subdues the colors a bit, but this seems to make the plots less dramatic. Is this what you had in mind?
Yup, artistic license!
In case anyone is interested, I have posted an article on how someone who doesn’t yet have IDL 8 can do this in direct graphics:
http://www.idlcoyote.com/cg_tips/polarwind.php