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Live globe
The live globe is a MapMap map on MapLibre's globe projection with live and forecast Earth data drawn on it: satellites, wind and weather forecasts, earthquakes, volcano alerts, fire detections, lightning, meteors, buses, aircraft, traffic, and real routes and drive-time reach. It is for anyone who wants to see what MapMap's map and live layers look like together, and for developers deciding what to build: every layer says how it is made, and most come with the code to draw the same thing in your own app.
Availability: live at mapmap.ai/globe, free, with no key and no signup. The panel calls it a labs experiment: the page changes often, and it is a demo, not a product you buy. What you can build from it ships in
@mapmap/maps, the live layers, the hosted API and the MCP server; the table below says which layer is which.
What it shows
The panel, top left, has one row per layer. Each row has an (i) with
what the layer is, how fresh it is and how it is built. Wind, satellites
and earthquakes are on when you open a bare /globe; everything else is
off until you turn it on or a link asks for it.
Earth and sky
| Row | On by default | Source | How fresh | The label it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Satellites | Yes | CelesTrak orbital elements; positions computed in your browser with SGP4 (satellite.js) | Elements refreshed daily and cached for six hours | A curated set (the ISS, Hubble, Sentinel, Landsat, NOAA, MetOp and GPS), at most 300 objects. "Higher orbits are drawn closer than they are: true to 2,000 km, then compressed." |
| Wind | Yes | NOAA GFS forecast at 0.25 degrees, processed by MapMap | The newest run, 48 hours in 3-hour frames | "A forecast, not an observation" |
| Weather field: rain, temperature, cloud or gusts (one at a time) | No | The same GFS forecast | As wind | Forecast. A field with no file for the hour is offered dimmed, with the reason. |
| Pressure | No | Sea-level pressure lines from the same GFS forecast | As wind | Forecast |
| Earthquakes | Yes | USGS real-time feed, magnitude 2.5 and above, past 24 hours | Checked every minute | "Shown as reported; magnitudes and locations may be revised." A quake from the past 2 hours rings slowly while it is in view. |
| Quake waves | With earthquakes | The iasp91 Earth model (Kennett and Engdahl 1991), travel times computed with ObsPy TauP, from each magnitude 5 and above quake | Live, or a replay at 60 times speed that says so | "Modelled wavefront (iasp91), not measured" |
| Volcanoes | No | USGS Hazard Notification System alerts above normal, placed with NOAA NCEI locations | Checked hourly | "US-monitored volcanoes only: an absent alert says nothing about volcanoes elsewhere." |
| Fires | No | NASA FIRMS VIIRS (Suomi NPP) detections, past 24 hours, in half-degree cells | Checked every six hours | "Satellite-detected heat, not confirmed fires" |
| Lightning | No | NOAA GOES-19 and GOES-18 Geostationary Lightning Mappers, processed by MapMap | The last minute, replayed about 40 seconds behind real time | Coverage is the Americas, the Atlantic and the East Pacific, about 52 N to 52 S: no flash elsewhere means no data, not no storms |
| Meteors | No | Global Meteor Network camera trajectories | Its latest full day, refreshed every six hours | "A past night, never live." Shown only where GMN cameras watch. |
| Day and night | No | The real sun position at the time shown; city lights from NASA's Black Marble 2016 composite | Computed | City lights "not live" |
| Aurora | Drawn with Day and night | NOAA SWPC OVATION aurora forecast | About 30 to 90 minutes ahead | A forecast, not an observation; reads "Now only" when the scene time is away from now |
On the ground and in the air
| Row | On by default | Source | How fresh | The label it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buses | No | DfT Bus Open Data Service (BODS) | "Positions as bus operators report them, usually every one to two minutes, eased between reports" | England only, from town zoom. Tap a bus to follow it. |
| Aircraft | No | adsb.lol, a community ADS-B network, under the ODbL | A file MapMap rewrites every half minute; positions refreshed about every 3 minutes and carried forward along the heading for up to 5 minutes, then held and dimmed | Not real time. Civil aircraft of known type only; private and business aircraft are shown without identity. |
| Traffic | No | National Highways closures and incidents (England), NDW traffic flow (Netherlands) | Republished by MapMap every minute | Shown from country zoom |
| Route | No | The hosted MapMap routing API through this site's demo key: car, or a truck at 4.5 m and 18 t | On request | The API's time without live traffic. Truck routes are limited to five an hour per visitor. |
| Reach | No | The hosted isochrone API: where a car gets to in 15, 30 or 60 minutes | On request | "Free-flow times: roads at their limits, almost no time for junctions, no traffic." Tap the map to start from somewhere else. |
Three more things on the page:
- Tap anywhere on the globe where nothing else answers and a card shows the GFS forecast at that point for the hour shown: temperature, wind, rain and sea-level pressure. Every value is a forecast and the card says so.
- Today on Earth picks one story of the moment from the feeds the page already reads (the deepest forecast low, the strongest recent earthquake, a red volcano alert, a strong geomagnetic storm, the largest cluster of heat detections, the strongest forecast gusts), labelled Forecast, Live or Yesterday. If nothing passes its checks, there is no story. Aircraft and the ISS are never stories.
- Sources, under View in the panel, holds the full credit and licence wording for every feed.
The aircraft and lightning layers have their own notes: the aircraft layer (what is never shown, removal requests) and the lightning layer (coverage, deduplication, rounding).
Open it with a link
The globe keeps the view in the address bar, so any view is a link. The Share button copies it.
- A bare
/globeopens the default scene (globe, wind, satellites, earthquakes), pointed at your side of the world. Your approximate location comes from the request's network address at city level, is used once, and is not stored. With no location it opens on the Atlantic. - A link with
viewis restored exactly: a layer key that is absent means off. Two exceptions: earthquakes stay on unless the link sayseq=0, and a missingprojmeans the globe. - A link with
sceneand noviewopens a named scene (below), and any other key in the link overrides it.
| Key | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|
scene | A scene id (below) | Opens a named scene |
view | <lat>,<lng>,<zoom>[,<bearing>,<pitch>] | The camera |
proj | flat | The flat map instead of the globe |
wind, sats, buses, planes, traffic | 1 | Wind, satellites, buses, aircraft, traffic |
wx | rain, temp, cloud or gust | The weather colour field |
iso | 1 | Pressure lines |
t | An ISO minute, 2026-10-12T06:00Z | The forecast hour for wind and weather together; absent means the frame nearest now |
eq | 0 | Earthquakes off |
volc, fire, lightning | 1 | Volcano alerts, fire detections, lightning |
meteors | 1, or replay | Meteors, drawn still or replayed through the night |
night | 1 or 0 | The Day and night switch |
aurora | 0 | Aurora off (it follows Day and night otherwise) |
follow | sat:<NORAD number>, <operator>:<vehicle> for a bus, plane:<id> | Keeps the camera on one object |
route | <lat>,<lng>;<lat>,<lng>[;...], 2 to 25 stops | A route |
vehicle | truck | A truck route (car otherwise) |
truck | <height m>,<weight t> | The truck; 4.5,18 when absent |
reach | <minutes>[,<minutes>...]@<lat>,<lng> | Up to three drive-time rings, each 1 to 120 minutes |
story | A story id | Opens a Today on Earth story, once it matches the published feeds; otherwise today's pick |
Coordinates are latitude first, as on /map. Some links:
/globe?scene=iss: follow the International Space Station./globe?view=54.5,-2.5,4.6&wx=rain&iso=1: forecast rain and pressure over the UK, wind off./globe?reach=15,30,60@50.8225,-0.1372: drive-time rings from Brighton.
Named scenes
scene | Opens |
|---|---|
iss | The camera following the ISS over the wind forecast, night side on |
storm-atlantic | Gusts, pressure lines and wind over the North Atlantic (forecast) |
rain-uk | Rain and pressure over the UK on the hour now; press play for the 48-hour forecast |
tomorrow-rain | The same view this time tomorrow |
london-buses | Live London bus positions, with traffic |
brighton-bus-3d | Brighton's buses as 3D double-deckers on a tilted street map |
gusts-world | Gusts and wind across the whole globe (forecast) |
temperature-world | Air temperature and wind across the whole globe (forecast) |
pole-wind | The wind forecast circling the North Pole |
traffic-england | National Highways closures and incidents across England, and Netherlands flow |
The "Try this" chips under the panel title open three of them on a first visit: Follow the ISS, Tomorrow's rain, and Ride a Brighton bus.
Tours and presenter mode
tour=<id> plays a guided tour: a few stops, each a scene with a
one-line caption. A stop waits for its layers (at most 6 seconds); a stop
whose live feed is quiet or stale shows a fallback line for 3 seconds and
moves on. Space pauses and resumes, Page Down and Page Up step, Esc ends
the tour.
tour | For |
|---|---|
public (or 1) | Anyone at a stand or on a call, in five stops |
bus-operators | Bus operators and transport authorities |
highways | Highways authorities and their suppliers |
logistics | Fleet and logistics teams: truck routes, reach and closures |
agents | Teams building AI agents: each stop names the MCP tool behind it |
present=1 hides the site header, banner and footer, for a stand or a
shared screen; with a tour, the tour loops. Each tour has presenter notes
(captions, fallbacks, talking points) at /globe/notes?tour=<id>, for
example the public tour's notes.
Build the same thing
Each row's (i) has a How this is built line, and a Build this
button that opens the recipe: an @mapmap/maps snippet, the gateway call
that returns the same data, and a prompt for the hosted MCP server. Where
a layer stays on this page, the recipe says so and offers no code. That
is what "code included" means on the Products menu.
| Layer | How it ships | SDK | Gateway | MCP tool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The globe | SDK | createMap from @mapmap/maps, on MapLibre's globe projection | GET /tiles/planet/tiles.json | None |
| Earthquakes, volcanoes, fires | SDK and API | EarthEventsLayer from @mapmap/maps/live | GET /v1/events | events_in_area |
| Wind, weather fields, pressure | SDK and API | WindLayer, WeatherLayer from @mapmap/maps/live | GET /v1/weather/frames | weather_frames |
| Aurora | SDK and API | AuroraLayer from @mapmap/maps/live | GET /v1/space-weather | space_weather_now |
| Buses | SDK and API | TransitVehiclesLayer from @mapmap/maps; TransitVehicles3dLayer from @mapmap/maps/models when tilted | GET /v1/transit/vehicles | None for live positions; nearby_stops and next_departures for the timetable |
| Route, reach | SDK and API | RouteLayer and IsochroneLayer from @mapmap/maps | The hosted routing and isochrone API | route, reachable_area |
| Quake waves | Page code | The quakes are EarthEventsLayer; the rings are a custom layer on the SDK's shared field mesh (buildFieldMesh) | GET /v1/events for the quakes | events_in_area for the quakes |
| Traffic | Page code | Not in the SDK | The overlay is not in the API; National Highways closures along a route are: POST /v1/incidents/along | None |
| Lightning, meteors | Page only, for now | None yet | None yet | None yet |
| Satellites, aircraft | Page only | Not offered | Not offered | Not offered |
| Atmosphere, relief, night | Page code | Drawn through the SDK's custom-layer globe helpers | None | None |
Satellites and aircraft stay on this page by choice: MapMap does not offer CelesTrak or adsb.lol data through its SDK, API or MCP. Lightning (NOAA open data) and meteors (CC BY 4.0) could be served, but nothing serves them yet. The page-code layers draw through the helpers in custom layers and the globe.
The globe's default scene in your own app, with a key from the quickstart:
import { createMap } from "@mapmap/maps";
import { EarthEventsLayer, WindLayer } from "@mapmap/maps/live";
const map = createMap({ container: "map", apiKey: "snk_…", center: [-20, 30], zoom: 1.6 });
map.map.on("style.load", () => map.map.setProjection({ type: "globe" }));
const wind = new WindLayer(map);
const quakes = new EarthEventsLayer(map, { types: ["quake"], minMagnitude: 2.5 });
wind.start();
quakes.start();
Live layers starts from an empty folder (including the MapLibre worker step a bundler needs), covers each layer's options and reports, and has the licences. Buses are in Buses. From an agent, connect the hosted MCP server and ask; no key is needed to try it:
claude mcp add --transport http mapmap https://mcp.mapmap.ai/mcp
Other clients are in Use MapMap from any AI assistant.
Your app reads the gateway; the globe does not. The globe reads the same files from MapMap's own tiles host, with no key. Your app reads them through the gateway with your key: each request is one Standard unit, and a browser key may read the live layers' endpoints.
Credits and licences
The map's one credit line carries a short credit for each layer while it is drawn. The full wording is under Sources in the panel.
| Data | Credit and licence |
|---|---|
| Wind, weather, pressure | NOAA GFS forecast (public domain), processed by MapMap |
| Earthquakes | USGS Earthquake Hazards Program (US public domain) |
| Volcano alerts | USGS Hazard Notification System, with locations from the NOAA NCEI volcano database (US public domain) |
| Fire detections | NASA FIRMS, with NASA's acknowledgment and "as is" disclaimer |
| Aurora | NOAA SWPC OVATION forecast (public domain) |
| Quake waves | iasp91 model (Kennett and Engdahl 1991), computed with ObsPy TauP |
| Lightning | NOAA GOES-19/18 GLM, from NOAA's Open Data Dissemination programme, processed by MapMap |
| Meteors | Global Meteor Network, CC BY 4.0, processed by MapMap |
| Satellites | Orbital elements from CelesTrak (celestrak.org) |
| Aircraft | adsb.lol, Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0 |
| Buses | Bus Open Data Service, Open Government Licence v3.0, Department for Transport |
| Traffic | National Highways Transport Data Feeds licence (based on OGL v2.0), © Crown copyright / National Highways; NDW (Nationaal Dataportaal Wegverkeer) |
| Day relief | Blue Marble Next Generation, NASA Earth Observatory, graded by MapMap |
| City lights | NASA Earth Observatory Black Marble, 2016 composite, from NASA GIBS |
No endorsement by or affiliation with NOAA, NASA or USGS is stated or implied. The NOAA, NASA and USGS licence texts are quoted in full in live layers.
Limits
- A labs demo. The page is not a service with an availability commitment, and a feed can be quiet or stale on the day; each row says so ("Unavailable", "Loading") rather than drawing old data as new.
- Reported and forecast data, for display. Earthquakes, volcano alerts and fires are not a warning service and not safety-critical. Wind, weather and the aurora are forecasts.
- Coverage is partial by design: buses are England's; traffic is England's National Highways closures and incidents plus Netherlands flow; volcano alerts are US-monitored volcanoes; lightning covers the Americas, the Atlantic and the East Pacific; meteors appear only where GMN cameras watch; aircraft only where adsb.lol has receivers, with no coverage over most oceans.
- Aircraft are not real time and never include military aircraft, aircraft sending an emergency code, aircraft on the FAA's privacy list, or aircraft on the ground. No history, routes, origins or destinations.
- Routes and reach are not live-traffic answers. Route times are the API's without live traffic; reach is free flow, by car only (there is no truck reach). Truck routes are capped at five an hour per visitor, counted in your browser.
- Not offered: satellites and aircraft in any MapMap SDK, API or MCP tool; lightning and meteors in any of them yet; the traffic overlay in the SDK. The globe's page code is not published as a package.
- Not in React Native or Points:
@mapmap/maps/liveis a web SDK subpath.
Related
- Live layers: the four
@mapmap/maps/livelayers, step by step - Maps, tiles & Studio and custom layers and the globe
- Buses: positions, stops and timetables
- MCP server and Use MapMap from any AI assistant
- The live globe, and the full map