Aug 20, 2024

By Hurricane Beryl visualized near peak intensity. Mapbox, a global leader in location technology, introduced new capabilities for its Mapbox Tiling Service (MTS) to efficiently process, style, and serve raster data from weather visualizations to custom satellite and aerial imagery. The numerical information in NetCDF and GRIB raster data now persists from processing to rendering and can be styled for dynamic colourization creating visually stunning, interactive, and engaging weather maps. Commercial and national government agencies and other media and trade organizations that work with weather data can now use these new methods of animating raster particles to predict how the weather will behave, providing end users with specific and accurate insight to aid with decision-making. Raster Particle Animation The new MTS capabilities support adding data-driven particle animations to digital maps, a visualization technique that is ideal for data that includes multiple attributes such as magnitude and direction of wind, waves, or ocean currents. Particle animation helps to visualize how the weather will behave when data comes in lengthy increments, providing users with a more intuitive understanding of weather patterns. It also enables particles to persist when zooming and panning, giving users a more seamless experience within web and mobile applications. Streamlined Support for Raster Data MTS offers end-to-end processing, tiling, and hosting services for spatial data making it an all-in-one solution. Companies that use Mapbox as a single tech stack and pipeline for raster and vector data can now use internal resources to focus on engineering features that differentiate their product rather than building hard-to-maintain, expensive and undifferentiated proprietary processing systems. “Self-hosted data processing pipelines can be cumbersome and full of failure points, often requiring significant time and resources to develop, host, monitor and maintain. With raster support for MTS, you get all the control you need without the overhead of building and managing your tooling,” said Anthony Goddard, Expedition Map Maker at ZeroSixZero. “This has allowed us to save hosting costs and free up time to spend on developing features for users rather than troubleshooting pipelines.” “Mapbox partners with the most well-known weather providers to offer easy access to accurate and timely weather information, helping our customers keep the public safe and informed while reducing costs and time in development,” said Alistair Miller, product manager of Imagery, Mapbox. “The expanded MTS support for raster data equips our customers to deliver the most performant visualizations possible to end users.” Fine-tuned Tileset Customization MTS also includes the ability to create tailored tileset ‘recipes’ that improve ease of development for customers. The recipes configure a set of rules that tell MTS how to process data into tiles, providing fine control over tile generation decisions such as simplification, zoom level extent, and attribute, time-step, or band manipulation. With this level of flexibility, companies have a greater degree of control over their raster data than what other tiling solutions provide. “Mapbox provides a solution where we will not have to depend on maintaining our own Geoserver since the processing and hosting is done with Mapbox,” said Dr Jay Shafer, director of Utilities, Disaster Tech, Inc. “Instead of having to cache our raster tiles Mapbox does this for us which allows us to scale to many customers.” TAGS