Over the Rainbow with Google Maps

Tornadoes of 2011 is a series of animated heat maps showing tornado intensity, month by month, during 2011 in the United States.

For each month of 2011 a heat map animates on the the Google Map to create a visualisation of the tornado intensity during that month. The map itself is a great example of using the Heatmap Layer in the Google Maps API to add a temporal dimension to a mapped visualisation.

The temporal dimension to the map allows the user to visualise not only the locations of the tornadoes, month by month, but also the occurrence of tornadoes throughout the year.