Data sources

Every aircraft broadcasting ADS-B within about fifty nautical miles of the city, picked up by a volunteer network of ground receivers.

Aircraft that do not transmit, or that transmit without a position, do not appear.

from api.adsb.lol

Movements at the city's airport, worked out from the ADS-B feed rather than from an airport source.

Derived from aircraft transmissions, so it is not the airport’s own board.

Ships in each city's own water — Aberdeen harbour and the sea off it, the Firth of Forth, and the Clyde down to the Tail of the Bank — from AIS transmissions relayed by aisstream.io.

A berthed ship can be quiet for minutes at a time, so a harbour fills in slowly.

from stream.aisstream.io

NorthLink sailings to Orkney and Shetland, identified from the same AIS stream as other shipping.

from stream.aisstream.io

Every sea-state station within about 320 km — wave buoys and offshore oil and gas platforms — shown on the map with its latest reading.

Platforms report significant wave height only; the wave buoys also report period, direction, spread and sea temperature. Readings are half-hourly from the buoys and hourly from the platforms.

from wavenet-api.cefas.co.uk

Automatic air quality monitoring stations, from Defra’s Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) — where each station is, what it is currently measuring pollutant by pollutant, and its Daily Air Quality Index.

Provisional readings from the automatic network, published before quality assurance — a ratified figure released later may differ. The index uses the official Low to Very High thresholds on the averaging periods they specify; where a station cannot be banded honestly it shows readings and no band, and the card names which pollutants its index is built from. This is the AURN, one of several UK networks — locally-managed sites are a separate network and are not in this feed — and it is what each instrument measures now, not Defra’s forecast for the days ahead.

from uk-air.defra.gov.uk

Every bus stop in the area and its scheduled departures, from the national timetable dataset.

The published timetable, not live running. Refreshed weekly.

re-baked monthly · from data.bus-data.dft.gov.uk (Scotland GTFS)

Venues and what is on at each, for whichever of Edinburgh's festivals are running today — data provided courtesy of the Edinburgh Festivals Listings API. One layer per festival, and none for a festival that is not on.

Not an official festival application. Cancellations reach this map on the hourly refresh, so a show cancelled in the last hour may still appear — check the festival's own site before travelling.

from api.edinburghfestivalcity.com (all festivals)

Ember's electric coaches, live from the operator's own realtime feed.

Only Ember. Other operators do not publish live positions for this area.

from api.ember.to

Pump prices at every forecourt in the area, from the retailers’ own statutory filings.

Retailers file prices on their own schedule, so a price can be a few hours behind the sign.

from developer.fuel-finder.service.gov.uk

Temperature, wind, gusts and conditions — an hourly observation from the Met Office’s nearest station to the city, not a forecast.

If the Met Office is unreachable the panel holds the last observation rather than substituting a forecast, so check the time it was taken. Sea state comes from a separate source and is reported on its own line below.

from data.hub.api.metoffice.gov.uk

Registered taxi ranks in the city and the towns around it, from NaPTAN — the Department for Transport’s national register of public transport access points.

Where a rank is, not whether a taxi is on it — no feed reports waiting cabs. Councils register ranks voluntarily, so a town with none listed may still have one.

re-baked monthly · from https://naptan.api.dft.gov.uk

Arrival and departure boards for the city's stations and the stops around it, from National Rail's Darwin service.

from api1.raildata.org.uk

Where a train probably is between stations, worked out from its Darwin timings and the track geometry.

Estimated, not observed. Britain has no public live train-position feed, so these are interpolated and labelled as such everywhere they appear.

from api1.raildata.org.uk + data/rail-lines.json

Supply interruptions from Scottish Water.

Scottish Water publish interruptions on their website but offer no open feed, so this layer is empty.

Monitored sewer overflows on the Scottish Water network, from their near real-time Event Duration Monitoring feed — where a monitor is, whether it is activated now, and how long the last activation lasted.

A monitor indicates an overflow; it does not confirm one, and Scottish Water note that errors happen. Nothing here is a statement about pollution or whether water is safe to swim in. Refer to Scottish Water’s own map for the authoritative picture.

from api.scottishwater.co.uk

River levels at SEPA's gauging stations on the Dee, the Don and their tributaries, with the recent trend and how the level compares with a normal month.

from timeseries.sepa.org.uk (KiWIS)

Live and planned power cuts on the SP Energy Networks patch — central and southern Scotland, including Edinburgh and Glasgow. Published under CC BY 4.0.

SP Energy Networks' feed omits incidents affecting fewer than five customers for privacy, so its count reads slightly low against their own outage map.

from SPEN Opendatasoft (NEO dataset)

The Low Emission Zone boundary, from the national dataset all four Scottish LEZ cities publish through the Spatial Hub.

The boundary only. Whether a particular vehicle may enter depends on its emissions standard, which the Scottish Government’s own checker answers — the card links to it. Boundaries are reprojected from the National Grid and are accurate to a few metres, so do not use this to judge a single kerbside.

baked, updated when a zone changes · from https://data.spatialhub.scot/dataset/low_emission_zones-is

Live and planned power cuts on the network SSEN runs — the north of Scotland, including Aberdeen. Published under CC BY 4.0.

from SSEN open data portal

Crashes, closures and breakdowns happening now on the trunk road network, from Traffic Scotland’s DATEX II feed. © Transport Scotland, who own the data and all rights in it.

Trunk roads only — the A90, A96, A9 and similar — so a closure on a council-managed city street will not appear. Supplied without warranty as to accuracy or availability, and this site is not connected with Transport Scotland.

from trafficscotland.org DATEX II

Roadworks in progress on the trunk road network, from Traffic Scotland’s DATEX II feed. © Transport Scotland, who own the data and all rights in it.

Many schemes run for months, so the Now box only calls out works that began within the last five days — the rest stay on the map for anyone who asks. Works scheduled for a future date are a separate layer. Supplied without warranty as to accuracy or availability, and this site is not connected with Transport Scotland.

from trafficscotland.org DATEX II

What the roadside message signs are displaying, shown as the sign displays it — the operator’s own words and line breaks, not a summary. © Transport Scotland.

Sign locations come from a table baked from the same feed; messages are live. A sign showing nothing is not drawn, so an absence here means the gantries near you are blank rather than that the layer is broken.

from datex2.trafficscotland.org VMS + baked VMSTable

Roadworks scheduled for a future date on the trunk road network, from Traffic Scotland’s DATEX II feed. © Transport Scotland.

Not happening yet. These are works with a start date ahead of today, kept out of the live layer so that nothing on the map claims a road is disrupted before it is. Dates can move — the layer shows what is currently planned, not a promise.

from trafficscotland.org DATEX II

How long each instrumented stretch of trunk road is taking to drive right now, against how long it normally takes at this time of day. Measured by loops cut into the carriageway, from Traffic Scotland’s DATEX II feed. © Transport Scotland.

Green, amber and red are the delay against a normal journey, not against an empty road — so a busy but ordinary rush hour reads as green, which is what it is. The coloured road itself is drawn on OpenStreetMap geometry (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL) matched to the section endpoints Traffic Scotland publish; sections we could not match to a road keep a marker and no colour. Only the instrumented stretches appear — most of the network is not measured at all.

from datex2.trafficscotland.org TravelTimeData + baked TravelTimeSites

Traffic Scotland roadside camera images. © Transport Scotland.

A still, not a video feed, and refreshed on Traffic Scotland’s own schedule rather than ours.

from FTP mirror directory (unset)

from admiraltyapi.azure-api.net (UK Tidal API, Discovery)

Voi e-bikes and scooters available to hire.

from mds.voiapp.io

The ground itself, measured from the air at 50 cm and turned into the surface the 3D view stands on. Heights are relative to the ellipsoid, converted from Ordnance Datum Newlyn using the OSGM15 geoid model.

Baked 2026-08-14 from 11 source tiles, each pinned by SHA-256. Checked against nine surveyed spot heights before publication; every one agreed to within a quarter of a metre.

from LiDAR for Scotland Phase 5 - DTM

Every building drawn as a solid, from published footprints carrying a height derived from the same airborne survey. Each one keeps its own identifier, so a building can be asked what it is.

89,348 buildings, checked against the terrain they stand on: 95% agree within 1.5 m. Heights are the ninetieth percentile of the roof, so chimneys and aerials do not become spikes. Roof shapes are the surveyed LoD2 meshes for 37,990 central buildings; the rest are drawn with flat roofs.

LI, Qiaosi; Zhao, Qunshan; Quintas Zon, Maria; Jablon, Pierre Elie; Wang, Mingkang; Hu, Congying; Ou, Yunbei; Sen, Sohini (2025). Large-scale 3D building and tree datasets constructed from airborne LiDAR point clouds in Glasgow, UK [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15000747

from Large-scale 3D building and tree datasets constructed from airborne LiDAR point clouds in Glasgow, UK

The same streets and labels as the flat map, rendered to images and draped over the terrain so the 3D view reads as the same city rather than a different one.

Basemap © OpenFreeMap, style Positron, data © OpenStreetMap contributors

from OpenFreeMap · OpenMapTiles · OpenStreetMap