Animated & time-series maps
Maps that change over time: radar and satellite loops, storm tracks, animated choropleths, small multiples, time sliders and the export formats that carry them.
A map that changes over time can be shown three ways: as an animation, as a grid of small multiples, or as a single map of what changed. The guides here build all three from real time series — NEXRAD radar scans of Hurricane Beryl over Houston, GOES-16 infrared images, the IBTrACS best track and a year of weekly US Drought Monitor polygons.
Most of the work is keeping frames comparable: one extent, one palette, one clock, and the date on every frame. The pages check each frame against official statistics, measure GIF against MP4 and WebP rather than assuming, and show the faults that make a loop flicker, jitter or lie about time.
🧭 Start with the concepts
The ideas the how-to guides below assume you already have.
⚙️ Then do the task
Step-by-step walkthroughs with code you can copy and adapt.
- How to Make a Weather Radar Loop Animation in Python
- How to Make a GOES Satellite Loop in Python
- How to Animate a Hurricane Track in Python
- How to Make an Animated Drought Map in Python
- How to Make Small-Multiple Maps in Python
- How to Animate an Earthquake Sequence in Python
Show every how-to guide in this topic
- How to Animate Transit Vehicles from a GTFS Schedule in Python
- How to Animate Arctic Sea Ice Decline in Python
- How to Export a Map Animation as GIF, MP4 or WebP in Python
- How to Make a Time-Slider Web Map in Python
- How to Make a Before-and-After Swipe Map in Python
- How to Build a Space-Time Cube in Python
🔧 When it breaks
The errors this topic produces, with the cause explained rather than just the command.
Related topics
Subjects that keep coming up alongside this one, most overlap first.