Maps of the Week

Over the last 15 months or so the Berliner Morgenpost has created some awesome mapped visualizations. Berlin's neue Skyline is yet another super map from the German newspaper. This one uses 3d building data from OSM Buildings to create a story map exploring Berlin's growing skyline.

As you scroll down the page you can see how the center of Berlin has changed since 1990. The map spins and zooms into some of Berlin's new skyscrapers. The map sidebar also scrolls down to provide information on the building visualized in the current map view (the text is in German but the map still works if you view the page in Google Translate).


The Moscow design company Urbica is another map creator that has appeared on Maps Mania before. Their latest map, Moscow Bike Share Stats, allows you to examine the use of Moscow's bike sharing scheme in a number of ways.

The initial map view shows the number of bikes hired at each of the docking stations. You can also view the number of departures & arrivals, the number of round-trips made and the number of unique users recorded at each station. Using the map you can view visualizations of the traffic made between Moscow's different districts and data on the fares paid and the length of rides made by the bikes' users.


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).

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.