Weather Map Layers

Summary: Switching on live weather overlays such as rain radar, cloud cover and wind, and the SIGMET and pilot-report chips.

The map includes a set of live weather overlay layers, powered by OpenWeatherMap, that you can switch on independently or combine:

• Rain Radar
• Lightning
• Clouds
• Temperature
• Wind
• Pressure

These sit on top of the base map alongside any other layers you have active, so you can, for example, check rain radar against a flight you’re tracking or an airfield you’re watching.

SIGMETs and Pilot Reports

Three chips in the Weather section draw aviation weather hazards from aviationweather.gov:

• SIGMETs — significant weather warnings as polygons coloured by hazard: storms red, turbulence orange, icing blue, mountain wave purple, volcanic ash grey; a dashed edge means the warning is not severe. Hover for a summary; the popup reads as a sentence (“Severe turbulence forecast, surface to FL060 (6,000 ft), moving north-east at 25 kt, weakening.”) with the levels, movement, validity and the raw message under a fold.
• Pilot reports — dots sized and coloured by the worst turbulence or icing a crew reported, decoded line by line in the popup with the raw report under a fold.
• Routine reports — the routine airliner reports of wind and temperature at cruise, hundreds across the Atlantic at any time; off unless you turn it on.

The data refreshes every five minutes, and every ten with the other weather layers.