Weather & Meteorological Layers

Live and forecast meteorological data is ingested from OpenWeatherMap, NOAA, and Copernicus APIs. Observations, model output, and radar returns are fetched on configurable schedules with edge-side caching to respect API rate limits and latency budgets.

Global weather grids (precipitation, temperature, cloud cover, pressure) are delivered as GeoTIFF rasters or GRIB2 model outputs, reprojected to Web Mercator, tiled at multiple zoom levels, and served as PNG/WebP tiles for efficient progressive loading.

Tropical cyclone and severe storm tracks are derived from NHC and JTWC advisories. Forecast cone polygons and intensity estimates are parsed from official advisories, converted to GeoJSON, and rendered as animated arcs with confidence radius bands.

Wind speed and direction at multiple pressure levels (850 hPa, 500 hPa, 250 hPa jet stream) are sampled from GFS model output. Wind shear between altitude bands is computed and used to generate flight-safety advisory overlays on the globe.

Nowcast radar observations and NWP model forecasts are temporally blended using a linear weighting scheme. The 0–2 hour window prioritizes radar, with model forecast weight increasing beyond that horizon out to the 72-hour forecast limit.

Precipitation radar, storm tracks, wind shear zones, lightning strikes, and temperature overlays are composited on a globe.gl WebGL globe. Layers are toggled in real time with smooth opacity transitions and configurable forecast time scrubbing.