The live globe
Anyone at a stand or on a call: what is moving on Earth right now, in five stops.
Play this tour or play it in presenter mode (no site header, 20 px captions, the tour loops, and 90 seconds without input starts it again from the first stop). Space pauses and resumes, Page Down and Page Up step, Esc ends the tour. The tour finishes on More MapMap labs experiments.
For a stand or a shared screen, the kiosk link is /globe?tour=public&present=1: the public tour in presenter mode. present=1 on its own is the plain globe without the site chrome, with no tour.
Each stop waits for its layers (at most 6 seconds) before its caption shows. A stop whose live feed is quiet or stale shows its fallback line for 3 seconds and moves on, so check the stops marked below before you present.
| Stop | Depends on | Time | If quiet |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Wind at globe scale | Wind forecast | 9 s | Shown as loaded |
| 2. Follow the ISS | Wind forecast, Orbital elements | 9 s | Shown as loaded |
| 3. Rain over the UK | Weather forecast | 14 s | Shown as loaded |
| 4. Brighton buses in 3D | Live buses | 9 s | May be skipped |
| 5. Traffic in England | Live traffic | 9 s | May be skipped |
1. Wind at globe scale
Caption: Wind around the whole planet, from the latest NOAA GFS forecast.
If the feed is quiet: The wind forecast has not loaded yet. On to the space station.
- The trails are NOAA GFS forecast frames, processed by MapMap: a forecast, not an observation.
- Wind and weather are WindLayer and WeatherLayer from @mapmap/maps/live; satellites and the night side are demo code on this page, not in the SDK.
- The basemap and the globe projection are @mapmap/maps, the same SDK customers use.
2. Follow the ISS
Caption: The space station at its altitude, with day and night from the real sun below.
If the feed is quiet: Orbit data is unavailable right now. On to the UK's weather.
- Positions are computed in the browser with SGP4 from CelesTrak's published orbital elements.
- Higher orbits are drawn closer than scale so they fit on screen; the ISS is drawn at its height.
- The night side is worked out from the sun's position for the time shown.
3. Rain over the UK
Caption: Rain over the UK: the next 48 hours of the GFS forecast, playing.
If the feed is quiet: The rain forecast is unavailable right now. On to Brighton.
- Seventeen forecast frames three hours apart, from the newest GFS run, about 28 km resolution.
- Visitors press play themselves; the tour plays the loop for this stop only.
- Pressure lines come from the same forecast. All of it is a forecast, not an observation.
4. Brighton buses in 3D
Caption: Brighton's buses in 3D, as operators report them, eased between reports.
If the feed is quiet: Brighton's bus feed is quiet right now, so this stop is skipped.
- Positions as bus operators report them, usually every one to two minutes, eased between reports.
- From the DfT Bus Open Data Service under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- The camera follows the bus nearest the centre once the first positions arrive.
5. Traffic in England
Caption: Live closures and incidents on National Highways roads across England.
If the feed is quiet: The traffic feed is quiet right now. That is the end of the tour.
- National Highways Road and Lane Closures (DATEX II), National Highways Transport Data Feeds licence (based on OGL v2.0).
- England's closures and incidents, plus traffic flow in the Netherlands from NDW. Not worldwide.
- A delayed feed is greyed out and labelled Delayed, never shown as current.
Aircraft
The Aircraft row (off by default, planes=1 in a link) shows civil aircraft of known type from adsb.lol, a community ADS-B network, under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. The globe reads one small file that MapMap's server rewrites every half minute from adsb.lol's public API; each aircraft's position is refreshed every few minutes, carried forward from its speed and heading, and eased to the new report, so it is shown as a model moving smoothly, not as real time.
- Only civil aircraft whose type adsb.lol knows are included, and only where adsb.lol has receivers: there is no coverage over most oceans.
- Airline flights show their callsign and type. Every other aircraft, including private and business aircraft and helicopters, is shown without identity: the file does not carry a registration, an airframe code or a callsign for them, so the page cannot show one.
- Never shown: military aircraft, aircraft sending an emergency code, aircraft on the FAA's privacy list, aircraft adsb.lol marks as of special interest, and aircraft on the ground. No history, no routes, no origin or destination.
- The file is a filtered extract of adsb.lol's data and is declared ODbL itself; nothing of MapMap's is mixed into it, and only the latest file is kept.
- Removal requests: hello@mapmap.ai.
Lightning
The Lightning row (off by default, lightning=1 in a link) shows every flash the Geostationary Lightning Mappers on NOAA's GOES-19 (GOES-East) and GOES-18 (GOES-West) satellites saw in the last minute. Each satellite publishes one file every 20 seconds on NOAA's Open Data Dissemination programme, about 10 to 15 seconds after it closes; MapMap's server reads each new file, keeps the last 5 minutes, and the globe replays the flashes at their real millisecond timing about 40 seconds behind real time. That is the last minute, not now.
- Coverage is the outline on the map: the Americas, the Atlantic and the East Pacific, about 52 degrees north to 52 degrees south. Europe, Africa and Asia are seen by other satellites, so an empty sky there means no data, not no storms.
- Both satellites see the band between about 127 and 85 degrees west. Each flash is kept from one of them only, split at 106.1 degrees west, so nothing is counted twice. A fixed spot that repeats in one pixel with no storm round it is not lightning and is dropped.
- Positions are rounded to 0.01 degrees (about a kilometre; a GLM pixel is about 8 to 14 km across). A flash's size on the map follows its radiant energy.
- Lightning: NOAA GOES-19/18 GLM, processed by MapMap. NOAA data disseminated through NODD are open to the public and can be used as desired; no endorsement by NOAA is stated or implied. Nothing older than 5 minutes is kept.