For highways teams

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 MapMap for highways.

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.

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.

Other tours

• The live globe
• For bus operators
• For logistics
• For AI agents