The Maps of the Week

Forecast.io has created a beautiful heatmap of planet Earth and MapBox has quickly put together an animated version on the map. The Forecast.io Temperature Map animates through global temperatures recorded on August 10, 2013.

The map uses the new Quicklsilver map from Forecast.io. Project Quicksilver is a high resolution real-time map of global temperature, that updates every hour. GeoTIFF images of the map can also be downloaded from Forecast.io.


One very noticeable growth area in interactive visualizations over the last few months has been the sudden trend in maps that show the age of buildings.

CitySDK has created a map that shows the age of a staggering 9,866,539 buildings in the Netherlands. Buildings on the map, throughout the country, are colored on the map by their age of construction. You can even click on any of the nearly 10 million buildings to view the building's exact year of construction.


Germany's national railway operator DB Bahn has released a live Google Map showing the location of all the transit network's trains in real-time.

The DB Bahn Live Map animates all the trains' markers to show the current position of the trains in near real-time. The positions of the trains on the map are calculated from the drive-in or exit reports at stations and from the latest train messages.

Users can click on individual trains on the map to view what time the train left its last station and when it is expected to arrive at the next station.