How to make weather maps
This page explains 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.
Where to get 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.
How to process weather data
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. 👉 How to process data in NetCDF and GRIB2 formats
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).
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.
How to build a weather app
One key benefit of the MapTiler Weather library is that it can be easily combined with MapTiler basemaps to give users the dynamic modern map experience they are accustomed to, including panning, zooming, and tilting. We have 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.
To get started, go to 👉 MapTiler Weather SDK JS module. For inspiration, see examples of weather visualization and animation built with the SDK module.
