Creating an animated smoke map
When I produced this map showing how the smoke from the west coast wildfires was being blown across the US, I received a lot of requests asking how it was made. So I thought I would share the process with you.
First of all you need to get your hands on the data. The lovely people at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratories make available hourly smoke data on their website. There are many options on this page but the files I used were the 1-hour snapshots. You can tell which files these are as they all end in xxxxxxxx00100.
Click on the file names ending in this format you will then be taken to a page like this…
Next click on the NetcdfSubset link and you will be taken to a page like this…
The option you are after is column-integrated_mass_density_UnknownLevelType-200 = Column-integrated mass density @ null.
Check the box next to it and then scroll to the bottom of the page and click submit. The netcdf file will then download.
Repeat this process until you have all the files you need for your animation. Just a word of warning, the files on this page get purged after 24-hours so you will need build up a collection over a few days.
Once you have all the files you need, it’s just a question of dragging and dropping them into a QGIS document. You should see something like this…
Next you need to style the netcdf layer. The first thing you want to do is change the layer blending mode to Screen. This will remove the black so you can see the underlying map, which is a styled version of Natural Earth data…
Copy this layer style and apply it to rest of your layers. You do this by right-clicking on the layer Styles > Copy style…
Select the other layers and then right-click > Paste style…
Next you export the layers as individual PNGs. I’m going to assume you already know how to do this.
Once you have the layers in a folder you need to import them into Photoshop. The easiest way to do this is via Adobe Bridge. Just navigate to the folder containing the PNGs and got to Tools > Photoshop > Load Files into Photoshop Layers…
This will automatically load them in to Photoshop creating a separate layer for each PNG.
Next you need to go to View > Timeline and click on the Create frame animation button at the bottom
Next you want to click on the menu button in the top right of the Timeline palette and select Make frames from Layers.
This will create a separate frame for each of your layers…
Click on the menu button again and this time choose Select all Frames…
Click on any of the frames where it says 0 sec and a little dropdown arrow…
Set the time delay to 0.1 seconds.
Next you have two options. You can either create a gif or export as an mp4.
To create a gif hit Cmd-Alt-Shift-S (Mac) or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S (PC). Change the preset to GIF and keep an eye on the filesize (bottom-left, 17.83MB in this case)
Click save and you’re done. In this instance I created an mp4 because the gif file size was far too large to host on a web page. To do this you need to click on the timeline menu button and select Convert to Video Timeline…
Once you’ve done this you’ll notice the timeline changes to a video format. Click on the menu again and select Render Video…
Choose a location to save your file. For the settings I just stuck with these defaults…
Et voila!
