I've been digging around today in Google Maps and Leaflet API's to find if there is an easy way to get these boundaries instead of needing our users to manually outline these things (like drawing polygons on the map)?
[GIS] Does Google Maps API or OSM provide location/place boundaries
apiboundariesgoogle mapsleafletopenstreetmap
Related Solutions
I think that you need to know which projection was used for your weather image. If it doesn't correspond to the projection used by google maps ("web mercator", EPSG:3857), the weather image needs to be reprojected.
I have never tried the Crazed Monkey tile cutter, but I assume that it can't reproject the image. My suggestion:
- Find out the projection used for your weather image
- Reproject it with the help of gdalwarp
- Split it with the help of Crazed Monkey tile cutter
If you can't find any information about the orignal projection of the weather image, you might try to split it using Map Cruncher. But only if you have just a few images because you will have to click manually a few corresponding points on the the weather map and on satellite images...
NB:
- If you can get http://www.maptiler.org/ to work, it would be easier. Maptiler is based on gdal and can do the reprojection and the splitting in a single step.
- See also a question I asked about using the correct georeferencement (=projection+coordinates) for google maps images: How to georeference a web mercator tile correctly using gdal?
There are quite a lot of options, so I'll present a few generic ones:
Full Stack
Probably the most effort with the steepest learning curve. Store your data in some sort of database (typically PostGIS, but possibly SpatiaLite), use a middleware mapping server (like GeoServer or MapServer) to serve out a WFS which can be overlaid with Google maps using the Google Maps API. From a technical perspective there's no technical reason you have to use Google Maps here - OpenStreetMaps or Bing or even OrdnanceSurvey OpenSpace could be used. The following resources may be helpful here:
- http://workshops.opengeo.org/stack-intro/
- http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=1098
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Feature_Service
I think pretty much all of the stack is operating system agnostic so should work on OSX.
KML
Convert your areas to KML, style them as desired, put them on a public web-server somewhere then use the Google Maps API (or whichever you go with) to show your data. I don't know much about KML creation/conversion but some searching should get you far.
Google Fusion Tables
Pretty much as the title suggests, use Google Fusion Tables. I don't know much about it so can only give a basic pointer, you may have to use this in combination with the KML one, but its designed for data visualisation and can come up with some very pretty stuff.
http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/
Note - If you are going to use Google Maps, they do cost money after a certain number of impressions.
Best Answer
You can export data for several boundaries from the main OSM database. Administrative boundaries are complete in OSM for admin_level=2 that are for whole countries, and they are very up-to-date.
The deper you go in admin_level there are countries that have 100% coverage for each place region, other countries still have some gaps. When using data from OSM, pay attention to ist free licence ODbL.
Howto do that, search for "[openstreetmap] export boundaries" on this site, or search for "export boundaries" on http://help.osm.org
There you will find services how to get boundaries in different file formats. and you can display them via any framework like leafletjs, openlayers or any other.