Configure time settings

Spatial phenomena collected with time information may allow map users to see what happened at a specific time, or what may happen in the future; by animating time-based data you can visualize it at each step and see patterns or trends emerging over time. Examples of phenomena whose data is well suited for this purpose include hurricanes, tornadoes, and other meteorological events; population migrations; land-use and environment change; or wildfire or flood event progression.

Some map layers are time enabled, containing spatial datasets that contain different information for the same location at different times. If a map contains time-enabled layers, it is time-aware and the display can be configured to show the data during a specific period of time, or to animate the data over time.

Verify layer contains time data

You can find out if a layer in the map is time enabled by referring to the REST endpoint.

1. Open the map in the map viewer.
2. Click Details and click Contents.
3. Browse to the layer that contains time data, click More Options , and click Show Item Details.
4. Scroll down to the Map Contents (if a map layer) or Layers (if a feature layer) and click the hyperlinked text to open the description. If a layer is time enabled, you will find a section called Time Info on the web page that opens.

Configure time settings

1. Open the map in the map viewer.
2. Click Show Advanced Options. From here you can make the configurations below. To preserve the configuration changes, you need to save them to the map.

Playback speed

The default speed is two seconds per time interval. You can adjust this by moving the slider toward Slower or Faster. People viewing your map can change the default speed you set.

Time span

The Time Span section shows the timeline of each time-enabled layer in your map. You can see how the timeline of a layer compares to the other layers, and you can change the start and end times of the map. By default, the time span of the map is set to the union of timelines of all your time-enabled layers.

Time Span handles configuring the display of historical data only, where the time layers have timelines that have completed already. It doesn't handle time data that is still being accumulated. The start and end times for the time span are explicitly set.

You can change the time span in three ways:

1. Drag the handles on the slider within the Layer Time Lines section to manually set the start and end times of the map.
2. Select explicit values within the Start Time and End Time fields.
3. Click a layer's timeline to set the start or end time of the map to the start or end time of the layer.

Time display

Use the Time Display section to specify the amount of data to display as time passes. Enter a time interval and choose to show only the current time interval or all the data progressively over time.

1. Enter a numerical value for the time interval.
2. Choose the units for the time interval from the drop-down list. The units that appear in the drop-down list depend on the timelines of the layers. To change these units, you need to edit the layer properties of your data.
3. Choose how to display the data:
   • Choose only display the data in the current time interval to show only the data that falls within the time window. For example, if you have data representing hurricane paths over a 10-year period and you want to show the paths of all hurricanes that occurred within a given year, you would choose this option (and type 1 Year as your interval). As the map animates, you see the hurricane paths for the first year, the second, the third, and so on. Each year of data displays independently of the other years.
   • Choose progressively display all the data to show all the data over time. For example, if you have data representing hurricane paths over a 10-year period and you want to display all the hurricane paths that occurred over the 10-year period in successive years over the previous years, you would choose this option (and type 1 Year as your interval). As the map animates, you see the yearly hurricane paths cumulatively over 10 years.

Disable time animation

If you do not want the time slider to appear on your map, you can disable time animation on the time-enabled layer.

1. Open the time-enabled map in the map viewer.
2. Click Details and click Contents.
3. Browse to the layer you want to change, click More Options , and click Disable Time Animation.
4. Click Enable Time Animation to display the time slider you previously removed from the map.
5. If you own the layer and want to save the time animation setting as the default property of the layer, click Save Layer.