Animating the Weather

Leaflet.Rain is a plug-in for the Leaflet JavaScript mapping library which allows you to add a rain animation to your interactive maps. 

Thanks to the animated wind overlay developed by earth:: there is now an established tradition of representing weather conditions on interactive maps with animated graphics. Representing wind speeds and wind direction using animated flow lines is probably more useful for the user than an animated rain layer. However the Leaflet.Rain animation certainly has a visual impact and you can adjust the speed and size of the rain drops in each animation to represent the forecast (or current) levels of rain.

Leaflet.Rain includes a number of API options which do allow you to customize the width & length of the animated rain drops. There are also options to adjust the angle, spacing, interval and color of the rain drops in your animations. You can play with these options yourself in the demo of Leaflet.Rain. 

Grigory Golikov, the developer of Leaflet.Rain, has also released a Leaflet plugin which allows you to add an animated snow layer to a Leaflet map. Leaflet.Snow can animate snow flakes, with options to adjust the speed, density, size and color of the flakes. 

If you want to add an animated wind layer to your map then you can use the Windy Leaflet Plug-in. This uses the Windy API to add an animated global wind forecast to a Leaflet map.