Saturday, October 24, 2015

The Hurricane Patricia Movie Map


The Mapbox GL API is able to load video files as a layer on a map. This means that you can add drone or satellite captured moving images directly to your maps. The results can look pretty amazing.

If you don't own your own satellite or drone you can still use this video overlaid on a map feature. One option is to create an animated video from other data. This is what Mapbox has done with data from NOAA’s’s Global Forecast System. They have created a video from NOAA's predictive GFS-model of Hurricane Patricia wind gusts, from October 19th to October 26th, and overlaid it on top of a Mapbox map of North and Central America and the Central Pacific.

You can view the map on the Mapbox Blog. If you don't believe that the movie file is actually a layer on the map, then rotate (right-click and drag), pan and zoom the map  and notice how the video rotates, zooms and pans with the map.

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