Raster MTS
What is Raster MTS?
The Raster Mapbox Tiling Service (Raster MTS) is a tool for creating raster tilesets. With Raster MTS, you use configuration options (tileset recipes) to transform your raster data into raster tiles. The resulting tiles are hosted on Mapbox servers for use in your applications.
Raster MTS is unique in that it accepts quantitative raster data and retains the numerical character of data all the way through visualization on a map. Together with new types of visualization in Mapbox GL, this enables you to build new types of experiences, for example:
- View time-series meteorological temperature
- View time-series meteorological wind forecast data
- View categorical agricultural data
Raster MTS also allows you to process visual imagery and create raster tiles in webp, png, or jpg formats.
How to use Raster MTS
The workflow for Raster MTS is:
raster-array
Mapbox Style Spec Source to your map.raster-array
source
into a layer, for example a raster layer, and adjust
the styling to suit your needs.Mapbox Raster Tiles
Raster MTS delivers data in the Mapbox Raster Tile (MRT) format. You may think of MRT as a wrapper containing the metadata required to describe the structure of the encoded data and to allow partial fetching of bands via HTTP range requests.
Mapbox Raster Tiles contain data which meets the following characteristics:
- Layers: A tile has one or more layers. Two layers in a meteorological tileset, for example, could be the surface temperature and surface pressure.
- Bands: Each layer has one or more bands identified by a string id. For example, a band id may be a UTC timestamp which identifies the time-series step, though the semantic meaning of a band is not constrained.
While any numerical format is acceptable as source input, data in each layer is encoded as a 32-bit unsigned integer. A single value (2³² - 1) is reserved to denote NoData. Depending on the range and precision of your data, you must select a suitable floating point offset
and scale
. Given some encoded data
, the value
is computed as:
value = offset + scale * data
This format is a generalization of how the Mapbox Terrain-DEM v1 tileset encodes data, for which the offset
is -10000 meters and scale
is 0.1 meters.
Raster MTS for visual imagery processing
Raster MTS can process panchromatic, 3-band RGB, or 4-band RGBA GeoTIFF data into raster tiles in webp
, png
, or jpg
format. These tilesets can be added to maps as raster
layers. Note that GeoTIFFs must be encoded for RGB photometric interpretation rather than YCbCr.
Getting started
To get started with Raster MTS, the following links may be used to help walk through uploading your source data, creating raster tilesets, and publishing them to Raster MTS: