GIS Case Study
National Weather Station Network Portal
A public GIS portal visualising a national network of 300+ automatic weather stations in real time.
Domain
Weather Observation Network / Public Portal
Role
Full-Stack GIS Developer
At A Glance
What Makes It Work
Live observations from 300+ automatic weather stations across the country
Sixteen switchable metrics: temperature, humidity, rain rate, wind, pressure and more
Satellite, terrain and 3D basemaps with a full layer and boundary tree
Auto-refreshing observations with a live data-freshness indicator
Three hundred stations, one public map
A national network of more than 300 automatic weather stations was reporting observations every few minutes into an internal system that only the meteorological service could see. The public, the media, and downstream users such as agriculture and aviation got summaries hours later. The data existed in near real time; the access to it did not. The portal was commissioned to publish the network live: every station, every observation, on a public map, with the metric switching and context a general user needs to make sense of it, and reliable enough to stay up when a weather event sends traffic surging.
Live observations with a freshness indicator
The front end is React with Mapbox GL JS, and station observations are served as vector tiles for fast rendering across the whole network. Sixteen metrics are switchable, temperature, dew point, wet bulb, humidity, rain rate, pressure, wind and the rest, and station markers are colour-graded against a live legend keyed to the selected metric. A network-wide minimum and maximum readout names the extreme stations, which is the headline most visitors are looking for. Observations auto-refresh and a data-freshness indicator shows when the map was last updated, because a public weather map that might be stale is worse than none. Station search, sorting and a nearby-station lookup by latitude and longitude help users find their location. A layer tree covers map type, administrative boundaries, satellite imagery and terrain, with 3D basemaps available. Everything is tuned for the traffic pattern of a public weather service: quiet most days, and then everyone at once.
A network the public can actually use
The meteorological service now publishes what it observes as it observes it. Journalists pull current extremes from the map; farmers check the nearest station; the service's own forecasters use it as a quick network overview. Traffic spikes during storms have been absorbed without incident, which is the test a public portal either passes or does not. The interesting engineering was in freshness and load rather than cartography. A live map has to be honest about its own latency and has to survive its busiest day. That combination shows up in most public-facing web application development we do for agencies with real-time data.
Capabilities
Core Functionality
Metric switcher across stations, temp, dew point, wet bulb, heat index, feels like, wind chill, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed, wind gust, rain rate, daily / monthly / yearly rain and pressure
Colour-graded station markers with a live legend keyed to the active metric
Network-wide min / max readout naming the extreme stations
Station search, sorting and nearby-station lookup by latitude / longitude
Layer tree covering map type, boundaries, satellite imagery and station visibility
Satellite basemap, 3D terrain and bearing controls
Light, auto and dark interface themes
Technologies
Tools & Stack
Product
From The Working Application
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
How current are the observations on the map?
Stations report every few minutes and the map auto-refreshes to match. A freshness indicator shows the time of the last update, so a user always knows how old the picture is rather than assuming it is live.
Which metrics can be displayed?
Sixteen, including temperature, dew point, wet bulb, humidity, rain rate, pressure, wind speed and direction. Switching metric recolours every station marker against a legend for that metric and updates the network-wide min/max readout.
Can it handle traffic during a major weather event?
Yes. Observations are served as vector tiles behind a cache, and the front end is static, so load scales without hitting the observation database directly. The portal has absorbed storm-day traffic spikes without degradation.
Can users find the station nearest to them?
Yes. Station search, sorting and a nearby-station lookup by latitude and longitude are built in, and the map can be filtered to a region using the administrative boundary layer.
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