How to make weather maps

This article will describe the data sources, tools, and licensing needed to make a dynamic weather map using MapTiler. The MapTiler Weather tools can be used to animate your own weather data or can leverage data from our weather industry partners. The licensing of MapTiler Weather tools is conditioned on the use of MapTiler base maps in your applications unless a custom agreement is reached.

Sourcing weather data

There are many sources of weather data, ranging from national/regional weather models like those produced by the Deutscher Wetterdienst to global models like GFS from NOAA or ECMWF. There are also high-quality weather models created by commercial providers, including our data partner MeteoMatics.

Weather models range from completely open-source to commercial, so it is important to carefully read the terms of use before selecting the appropriate model for your application.

Weather data processing

The typical data format of weather models is NetCDF or GRIB2 format, which is quite a difficult format to work with, especially in raw form. MapTiler offers solutions for processing this data into the necessary format, with our data processing pipelines or with tools like MapTiler Engine.

Some weather model providers, including MeteoMatics, also sell weather data preprocessed into tile format so that the data can be ingested by the MapTiler Weather library.

The weather tilesets are required to be encoded into RGB format, meaning that up to three variables can be encoded into each tileset (for example the wave height, wave direction, and wave period).

Dynamic weather data with MapTiler Weather

The MapTiler Weather rendering library ingests data in tile format. The library is designed to be compiled directly into your own application, according to the documentation included in the GitHub repository. The library then ingests a single time series of tilesets, or multiple time series of tilesets, which are interpolated to display smooth animations of weather data over time and space.

Integrating with dynamic MapTiler base maps

One key benefit of the MapTiler Weather library is that it can be easily combined with MapTiler base maps to give users the dynamic modern map experience they are accustomed to, including panning, zooming, and tilting.

MapTiler has created a series of map styles that are optimized for the weather industry, including a Light, Dark, and Gray Satellite style. These can be used as a backdrop on which to show your weather data and provide geographic contexts such as country borders, hillshades, and labels.

Conclusion

MapTiler offers a full-stack solution for making a dynamic and modern weather map application from your own data or that of our data partners. Our tools are easy to use and integrate into your applications, which can then be served to your customers.

MapTiler Weather demo
MapTiler Weather solution & success stories