Animated Weather Maps

Recently the Mapbox blog posted a really awesome map of Hurricane Patricia. The map uses the Mapbox GL video overlay capabilities to create an animated map of NOAA's predictive GFS-model of Hurricane Patricia wind gusts.

Mapbox have now created an even more impressive map. Animated Atmosperic Water is a global map of NOAA's 3-hour interval GFS model composite of precipitable water in the atmosphere (October 15-28).

When I think about how much work went into creating the absolutely amazing animated wind map, Earth.nullschool, then it's hard not to think that animating weather data on a map using a video is cheating a little. However it is a brilliant cheat.

Mapbox GL video overlays allow you to quickly create really impressive animated weather maps (as long as you have access to really impressive weather videos). I also assume that using a video rather than animating thousands of individual points of data on the map means that the map itself performs much more efficiently.