Live weather

Icon Map overlays live weather on any map - rainfall, temperature, pressure isobars, storm energy, wave height, air quality - with animated wind particles flowing over your data, from surface breezes up to the jet stream. The data streams straight from free public forecast models (NOAA GFS and ECMWF), fetched by the browser with no API key, no weather subscription and no servers.

Weather is model analysis and forecast data, refreshed with each model run (roughly every 6 hours). It is not radar or live observations, and the map labels it honestly - the attribution line always shows the model, the run and the valid time.

Adding weather

There are three ways to put weather on a map:

• World Effects (the ribbon dialog) - the quickest route. Turn on Live weather, pick what to show, and optionally add Animated wind. This is an ambient map effect rather than a layer in the stack.
• Weather presets in Add layer - one-click, fully-configured layers: Jet stream, Surface winds, Rainfall, Temperature, Pressure & fronts, and Storm tracker.
• Weather and Flow particles layer types in Add layer - the same capabilities as ordinary layers you can reorder, toggle and fine-tune with the layer editor.

What you can show

Weather event markers can be layered on top: detected cyclone centres, jet streaks, atmospheric rivers, severe-storm risk, tropical development and clear-air turbulence. These are screening-grade detections computed in the browser from the model fields - decision support, not safety-of-life guidance.

Animated wind

Wind renders as moving particles in two styles:

• Flat streaks - the classic 2D flow map. Works everywhere.
• 3D atmosphere - particles carry altitude through a volumetric wind field, coloured by height from surface blue to jet-stream white. Spectacular on the globe projection, where the atmosphere wraps the planet.

Pick the wind altitude (surface, 850 hPa, 500 hPa or the jet stream at 250 hPa - flat streaks only; the 3D atmosphere spans all levels), and tune colour (by speed, by altitude, or a single colour), opacity, density, particle size, animation speed and trail length. The particle field follows the map as you pan and zoom, so detail stays constant from world scale to street scale.

Forecast

The Forecast slider scrubs from Now (conditions valid at the current time) up to +48 hours ahead. Every weather surface on the map - overlays and wind - follows the same forecast time. If the map's time slider is enabled, scrubbing it ahead of now drives the same forecast time from the bottom of the map.

Ambient precipitation

Ambient precipitation (in World Effects) adds falling rain or snow across the map as a cosmetic effect. In Live mode it follows the weather data - it rains on the map where it is actually raining, and turns to snow where the temperature is near or below freezing. Decorative, not data: it respects your system's reduced-motion preference.

Data, cost and attribution

• Sources: NOAA GFS and GEFS-Aerosols (US public domain) and ECMWF open data including its wave model (CC BY 4.0). Air quality always comes from GEFS-Aerosols and wave height from the ECMWF wave model, regardless of the selected model.
• No key, no fees: the browser fetches byte ranges of the public model files directly - there is no weather API, no subscription and no per-user cost.
• Attribution: the map's attribution line automatically credits the model with its run and valid time while weather is shown.
• Privacy: the requests carry nothing about your map or your data - see the security whitepaper for the endpoint list.

If your network restricts outbound hosts, allow the three weather buckets listed in Browser & network.