Weather Globe: a live 3D weather map of the Earth

Loading the live globe…

Weather Globe is a free, interactive 3D globe of the weather right now. It shows the real day and night, clouds decoded from live geostationary satellite infrared imagery, the wind near the ground, current temperatures for about 230 world cities, and the International Space Station flying over the globe in real time. No account, no sign-up: everything is worked out in your browser.

What you can do

• Drag to turn the globe and scroll to zoom; the land and the clouds sharpen as you zoom in.
• See satellite clouds, and a Wind layer of drifting trails; the Layers menu turns each on or off.
• Search any town or region on Earth, fly to it and read its weather now, in °F or °C.
• Ride along with the International Space Station, drawn as a 3D model at its real height, with what lies below it.
• Turn on Music for 30-second previews of songs from cities around the world on a virtual cassette, and a song of the day picked by the first music city the ISS flies over after midnight UTC.

How fresh is the data?

City temperatures are refreshed every hour. The page checks for a new NOAA cloud mosaic every 20 minutes, and zoomed in by day it draws the clouds from satellite pictures taken every 10 minutes. The ISS is worked out in your browser (SGP4) from its orbital elements, read every few hours, to within about 10 km of NASA-grade trackers for a day.

Data sources

• Clouds: NOAA nowCOAST Global Mosaic of Geostationary Satellite Imagery (GMGSI), longwave infrared.
• Imagery: NASA GIBS (Blue Marble, shaded relief, GOES-East, GOES-West and Himawari).
• Temperatures, wind and place search: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0).
• Coastlines and borders: Natural Earth.
• The ISS's orbital elements: wheretheiss.at.
• Music previews and covers: Apple Music; singers' photos: Deezer.

About

Weather Globe is open source (MIT) and hand-written in WebGL2 with no 3D library: source code and documentation on GitHub. It shows current conditions and model data to explore; it is not an official forecast or warning service.