Transitioning between weather forecast imagery

When working with geographic information, its geometrical representation in space is not the only important thing. There's also the dimension of time that we can take into account. People are increasingly interested in up-to-date information or data based around particular moments in time.

This way, visualizations can show us how data changes over time: city population, disease outbreaks, weather forecasts, and so on.

In this recipe, we're going to show you how we can create an animation on the client side by transitioning between weather forecasts at different times of the day.

We're going to use a WMTS service from the Met Office (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk), showing the rain evolution at different time instants (as shown in the following screenshot), and we will create an animation by making the previous forecast fade away and the new one fade in. The time of day that the visualization represents will be displayed at the top-right of the map...