 Welcome back to my YouTube channel. Today there's a storm passing over the Netherlands. The storm is called UNESCO and this is a great opportunity to explore the visualization of wind in QGIS. So for this task we are going to download a Grip file with wind data and we're going to visualize it using the mesh styling panel in QGIS and export it to an animated GIF. There might be some sound effects during this video because the storm is passing over at this moment but that fits nicely the topic of this video. So you need to find a Grip file for your study area here. This nice website has open data from KNMI but a format that is better readable by different tools so also by QGIS and I'm downloading here the Grip file for wind for the Netherlands and I'll provide the link to this page in the description of this video. So let's add the downloaded file to the map canvas. You see here the Grip file and when we expand it we see two data types and we need the mesh format that you can recognize from the icon. You see these nice colors now in the map canvas and we see that the layer has a clock indicating that it's temporal data. We go to the layer properties I find here the temporal information that is used. I'm also going to change the projection of the project to the Dutch projection and I want to have a layer indicating the boundary of the country and I'm going to use this layer from the PDockServices plugin with open data for the Netherlands. I'm going to style the country boundary with a simple line just that we don't get lost in all the colors and arrows that we're going to show. The layer styling panel adapts to the mesh data and we can change the settings there and I want to show the wind speed in colors but also in arrows. So I check both the contour option and the arrow option, the vector option and later we'll have a look at the colors but let's first style the arrows so it's quite dense with arrows at this moment so I'm going to check the box to display the arrows on a user grid and I want to scale the arrow length by the magnitude so by the wind speed and I change it to a scale factor of one. We can also change the color let's make it blue and let's activate the temporal controller and I see there that it uses already the values from the files you can always use the refresh button and when I use the slider I see here the colors and the arrows changing so this already looks quite good. If I find the arrows a bit too overlapping so I increase the spacing of the grid to 20 pixels here so it's a bit of trial and error to get the result that you want but this looks better. Now I would like to add a counter to show the time step that we are looking at and some extra information so I'm going to add a scratch layer you can make a fixed layer of course but this is just a quick way call it time and I use a point geometry keep everything as it is and simply add a point and then we are going to create a label for that point the two single labels go to the expression editor and I want a little title there storm unis in single quotes so it's a string I use that button to concatenate other things and that other button for the next line and then I concatenate it with the time from the temporal controller it's a variable and that's the map start time so when I add that I see in the preview that it doesn't look very human readable so I can use the format date function and in the panel on the right you can read how to use that so I'm going to first create the date so I use the day the full month and then the year and you have to put this in single quotes and then close it with the bracket and then in the preview you can see the result of this formatting that looks good I'm going to add another line with the time just simply copy the part that I had for the date and replace there and the part to indicate hours and minutes it gives a that the expression is valid because there is a concatenation missing so I need to add it there and the preview looks good click okay to apply it there and there you see it and let's tweak a little bit more choose another font change the color of the font and make it a bit bigger change the placement settings to that it centers and then I can remove the point because we don't want to see the point we want just a label so there it is but now when I run the temporal controller the label is not really changing or updating so I need to also activate the temporal controller for that layer click right go to the layer properties let's accept here the projection and then check dynamic temporal control and choose redraw layer only then every time step the layer will be drawn again using the correct time step and here we see then the result which is indeed that it counts the hours now I want to have the area in the map canvas that I want to export so you could do this in several ways but I always find it easy to just reshape the part of the map canvas so it fits our map and then export everything that is there and we still miss a few elements it's good to have a skill bar so I'm going to use the decorations and choose skill bar enable the skill bar and here you can place it so use 10 horizontal and 10 vertical and there I see in the preview what it is if I click apply so let's do the same for the legend there is no decorator for the legend so we need to add a picture go to the legend settings go to customize number format because I want zero decimals and I want to use the space on the right so I need a horizontal direction and that looks good and I'm going to make a screenshot and I save this as a png so go back to view and then decorations and I add an image enable image browse to the image and there you can change some settings like the size and also the horizontal and vertical placements let's see where it goes it's a bit too far in the corner so also use 10 and 10 and it's a bit too small use 26 millimeters a little bit too big like a bit smaller okay that looks good and then we are ready to export it as frames for an animation so make sure that it's at beginning and it looks as you want and then use this save button and choose an output directory where it will save the png for each frame it uses by default the map canvas extent and I click save and it will export now all the png files so after the export message comes that it was successful you go to gimp and in gimp you choose open as layers make sure that you have selected all the layers that you want to add and that they are sorted so by name in this case and after importing the layers you go to filters animation optimize for gif and then you export this whole set to a gif file so I call it unis arrows because later we're going to do the traces it recognizes the options of the gif so remove the comment choose as animation and you can play with this value for the delay between the frames I use 200 here and this is then the result super nice animation now let's do the same for styling with traces that's a different way of styling so go back to the vector tab and there I choose traces instead of arrows and you see it's now rendered and you can play with the particle count and the maximum tail length so let's make this 50 millimeters so that looks good so we're ready to export this one too in the same way so let's save it in a new output directory called traces there it is so imported to gimp open as layers make sure you're in the right folder to have all the traces and then again go to filters animation optimize for gif and then export the animated gif give it a new name remove the comment check the box for animation change the delay export and here's the result that looks pretty stormy so I hope you've enjoyed this video you can apply this technique with all kinds of mesh data that you can find on the internet and if you like these videos please subscribe to my youtube channel look forward to see you again next time