Google Maps has made speculative road trips easier than ever before. But when you actually make up your mind and decide to head out on one, wouldn’t it be great if you could choose the route which had the best weather?
Fortunately, Stamen Design, which is responsible for some pretty cool alternative map skins, has been working with the Weather Channel to create a tool that lets you see how the weather is set to vary along your route. It mashes up Google Maps and Weather Channel data, and it’s kind of cool.
You type in your origin and destination, and it displays weather icons along the route so you can see what conditions are going to be like. Importantly, it takes into account journey time, too, so you don’t see what the weather is like now along the route, but instead what the weather will be like when you arrive at every point. If there’s rain, you can drag the route to change it and see how the weather changes before settling on the best option.
It’s kind of a shame that it can’t automatically plan your route specifically with the best weather in mind—but it’s still a pretty neat combination of data sets. You can play around with it on the Weather Channel website. [Weather Channel via Stamen Design via Flowing Data]
