Storm chasing

So far we have created a simpler version of what the Nextbus website already does. But we have done it in a way that ultimately gives us complete control over the output. Now we want use this control to go beyond what the Nextbus Google Maps mash-up does. We'll add another real-time data source which is very important to both travellers and bus-line operators: weather.

OpenWeatherMap.org (OWM) provides free, polished weather data for applications. They also have an excellent website for exploring data sets. The following screenshot is a snapshot of the weather over the Thunder Bay area. The area of our Nextbus tracking feed is circled in black:

We use this data to create a real-time weather map for our bus location map. We'll need to use a different approach to create this geospatial product because the OSM StaticMap API does not allow blended overlays like the image shown in the preceding screenshot. Both the OSM and OWM data are typically served out in small tiles to speed...