Using telefi provided layers

telefi provides a number of useful layers on top of the map to give better insights on the areas you are looking to collect data from. Most recently, we've added hail maps dating back 8 years and is updated daily. This provides an overlay heatmap of where hail was measured, the date it happened, and the size. Besides this layer, we also provide census data including size of the house, number of bedrooms, density of specific income brackets, house fuel type, and more! For this example, we will use our free hail maps to learn how to use them.

1. From the main map view, click on the layers tab on the left sidebar. This is the third button on the bottom with multiple overlapping squares as the icon.
2. Underneath the "Weather" subheader, click on the "Hail maps" entry. The eye on the right of the text should become illuminated and a menu will populate below.
3. If the area your map is showing has had any hail storms in the last 8 years, it will show a list at the bottom of the menu with dates, the max hail size, and the number of events that were measured on that date in the area your map is focused on. These entries are sorted by date with the most recent storms displayed at the top. If there are no events in the area, it will display the text "No hail storms found within shown area". Move around the map until you see some dates populate in the list. You may need to zoom out far enough for there to be any events depending on the location.
4. Click on one of the menu items. You should see the heatmap show up on the map. As there are denser collections of events or if there is hail that is particularly large, you should see the heatmap get darker. In addition to this, once you have zoomed in enough, it will display the size of the hail measured in that particular area.
5. At the top of the hail maps menu, you may notice a "Minimum hail display size" dropdown. You can use this to filter out hail smaller than the selection in this dropdown. For example, if you only wanted to display hail on the heatmap that is 2.0 inches or larger, select from the dropdown 2.0 and you will see a number of points remove themselves from the map. Note: this dropdown does not impact the list of dates on the hail maps menu and will only filter what is displayed on the map from the currently selected date.
6. In addition to the individual date selections, you may click on one of the buttons beneath the drop downs labelled "Last year" or "Last 6 months" to show a rolling aggregation of all hail storms within those periods. This is updated daily and will include the most recent storms you could see in the dates list.
7. For specific insight on an area, you may hover your mouse over the heatmap and a pop up will display the date it was measured, as well as the size in inches. This is particularly useful for the "Last year" and "Last 6 months" selections so you can pinpoint the exact day that an area was hit with. Once you have the layer setup how you would like on the map, you can then close the layers menu and the setting will persist on the map. You are now free to pull data having the additional knowledge of where hail fell and the size and date! The hail maps are currently our most complex layer in terms of interactivity, but the same basic principles apply to all of our layers. Try playing around with the different layers to see what insights you can gain on the areas you are seeking to pull from. As of right now, only one built in layer at a time is supported to be displayed but in the future we may support multiple.