The Weather's Getting Animated

The weather has been looking better lately. This is largely due to some great work being done by CartoDB and Mapbox.

Last week CartoDB Heat Maps was used to create this map of historical Hurricane and Tropical Cyclone Track Density. The map animates the track density of hurricanes and tropical cyclones from 2000-2013, using data from the National Climatic Data Center. Over at Mapbox they've been using Turf.js to create Animated Heatmaps and Grids. A map which not only shows an animated heat-map of historical hail data but also allows you to view the data as animated hexbins, triangles, squares and points.

Turf can also be used with Leaflet, as TannerGeo has shown with this Weather in Turf map. As you are probably aware February was an historically cold month in the USA. Weather in Turf uses data from NOAA to visualize weather station data from across the US. The map uses a Voronoi diagram overlay to show a heat-map of temperature, mapped to the closest weather station.


The Leaflet TimeDimension plug-in can also be used to animate weather data on a Leaflet map. The Leaflet TimeDimension Examples page has a number of example maps with animated weather layers.

One neat example is this Climate Projection map which uses data from the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research to show projected temperature changes around the world up to 2099. This animated heat-map shows the projected effects of global warming over the next century.