The Maps of the Week

My favorite map this week was the Windyty Wind Forecast map. Windyty uses NOAA wind data to create a global animated wind map.

Watching the animated wind patterns on Windity can be pretty hypnotic, especially if you open up Noise Machine's Wind Noise Generator in another browser tab.  If you need to relax and unwind this Sunday then you could do worse than sit and back and watch the Windty map while listening to the Wind Noise Generator.


If you've ever wondered how Mario and Luigi manage to navigate so effortlessly around the Mushroom Kingdom and Dinosaur Land then you need to check out this Super Mario map from Duncan Graham. This interactive map re-imagines the world as an 8-bit map in the style of Nintendo's classic game, complete with golden coins and mushrooms.

Accompanying the map is a great 'how-to' guide on how the map was created with Mapbox Studio. It's worth reading the article if you want to learn about importing land or water source files into Mapbox Studio, how to add custom elements to your map and how to order layers.


This year there has been a number of really great mapped visualizations of New York taxi data. This latest map visualizes taxi traffic from JFK and LGA airports during the 2013 holiday season (Nov 15th to December 31st).

The NYC Taxi Holiday Visualization animates taxi journeys from New York's airports over the course of a month and half. As the animation plays you can view the animated tracks of thousands of individual cab journeys taken from JFK and LGA airports to all parts of the city.


The Solar Eclipse Finder is an Esri map that displays the path of past and future solar eclipses for any location on Earth.

The tool couldn't be simpler to use. Just click on the map and past solar eclipses at the selected location are shown on the map in green and future eclipse are shown in blue. If you mouse-over the path of a solar eclipse you can view details in the map side-bar.

The details on each eclipse include the date, time and the duration of the solar eclipse. The Solar Eclipse Finder includes the paths of 905 solar eclipses from 1601 to 2200.