The Maps of the Week

My favorite map of the last week hasn't even dented the top ten most read posts on Maps Mania over the last seven days (you can see the list in the right-hand panel of this page). So let's give it another go.

Project Ukko is a beautiful new mapped visualization of seasonal wind predictions. The map is a visual interface which provides industry, energy traders, wind farm managers and others with a way to access predictions about future wind conditions.

On the map you can drill down to view regional wind forecasts at a detailed level. The line symbols on the map represent predicted wind speed through line thickness and the predicted wind speed via the tilt and color of the line. The more tilted the lines then the stronger the predicted indication of significant changes in wind speed.


Project Ukko wasn't the only brilliant weather map to be released this week. The Global Weather Comparison map allows you to compare the weather between different locations around the world. It allows you to pick two different weather stations, from more than 14,000 locations world-wide, and compare their temperatures, rainfall and hours of sunshine.

To compare the weather of two different locations you just need to click on their markers on the map. The complete annual weather data for these two stations can then be compared in the graph below the map. You can also use the map menu to directly compare the temperature, precipitation or sunshine hours between the two locations, in the graph below the map.


The top most read map this week on Maps Mania was the Interactive Scribble Map. The Interactive ZipScribble Map connects all the Zip or postal codes in a country in ascending order. The resulting map provides a visual representation of how countries around the world arrange or order their post code systems.

If you view the ZipScribble map of the USA, you can immediately see that zipcode density appears to closely follow population density (the more people that there are in an area then the more zipcodes there are).

As I understand it the first digit of a U.S. zipcode represents the state. If you turn on the colors on the map you can see that zipcodes do indeed seem to remain within state lines. Use the drop-down menu beneath the map to view the postal code maps for other countries. There are maps for 38 different countries in all.