Last night I watched "The Remarkable Mind of Mr. Tornado" on PBS. Tetsuya "Ted" Fujita was a pioneer in meteorology, known for developing the F-scale to measure tornadoes. His studies led him to draw many maps of this nature.
What I enjoyed the most was his personal maps. When he was invited to the University of Chicago to work with professor Horace Byers, he experienced his first airplane flight. During the flight he drew this charming map showing the clouds he passed through on a multi-day flight with two stopovers on Wake Island and in Hawaii.

Via PBS, "American Experience"

This map is a bit hard to read at this size so here is some detail. Click the picture above to see the entire map at higher resolution.
In his own words "Without wasting the expensive flight time, I began sketching the vertical time cross section of clouds along the flight path. Shortly before 1600 JST, the aircraft flew into towering cumuli, encountering severe turbulence. I heard crashing sounds of dishes and utensils in the flight kitchen. A moment after, the flight became smooth and I saw a beautiful arc of low clouds.”

After settling in Chicago he began to document his travel throughout the United States and Canada, first by railroad, then by car.
He traveled through every state except Rhode Island. According to the map he only missed it by a few miles. I have chronicled my own travels in this manner but not with nearly as much charm or detail.

Highlights of this map include the tornado-chasing squiggles through Oklahoma and the green elevation contours.

More on Mr. Fujita here.
 

Earth is a project from Cameron Beccario showing a wide range of climatic conditions that can be animated. Here are the winds animated from Hurricane Florence as it made landfall on September 14th.
At the same time an even more intense Typhoon Mangkhut battering the Philippines.
You can choose to look at air or ocean currents, waves, water and air temperatures (at different heights)  and various other factors. You can even switch map projections. Here are ocean waves using the Waterman Butterfly projection,
and ocean currents in the North Atlantic, looking very Van Gogh-like.
Data are from various global sensors, the geographic data comes from Natural Earth. The visualizations are created in the browser using javascript programming. The color schemes are intuitive enough that no legend is required. Here is the three hour precipitation accumulation over North Carolina from the hurricane.
Another option is the probability of seeing an aurora.
Explore more here

At the risk of minimizing an awful tragedy, Hurricane Harvey has inspired some wonderful maps, particularly from the New York Times and Washington Post. This animation from the Times is spectacular. Click the play button and watch it unfold.

With over 48 inches of rain, Harvey set a record for total rainfall from a tropical system in the continental U.S. https://t.co/0eFyv3RIby pic.twitter.com/S27hXOxhPm

— NYT Graphics (@nytgraphics) August 29, 2017

The subtle dark circles indicating areas of peak rainfall create a remarkable sense of the storm's movement.

The Washington Post's cube showing the total rainfall is also pretty remarkable.
This only shows what rain had fallen as of August 27th so the situation has gotten much worse. In fact, here is an animation they just put on Twitter.

What would it look like if all 19 trillion gallons of water that fell on Southeast Texas since Friday were collected into a cube? pic.twitter.com/Cuq5VlqWsP

— Post Graphics (@PostGraphics) August 30, 2017

They did a nice job highlighting buildings and areas on the background map.

The total rainfall map is also quite striking. I lost the text on the image below but you almost don't need it. You can see the entire map with city labels, precipitation totals, legends and all by clicking on the picture.
Their map of rain gauges is also excellent.The arrows almost give it a three dimensional effect.
I tried to break out of the New York/Washington media to see what other maps are out there but these really are much better than anything else I've seen. The Houston Chronicle has little to offer for maps though they do have an impressive collection of photos of the devastation and rescue efforts. What is encouraging is to see many articles about cooking, sports and politics showing that life is getting back to normal for at least some people in the area.

As we prepare to spend Thanksgiving with my wife's family in western New York, here are some maps of what we could be in for. This one, posted on Flowing Data a few years ago does a nice job of showing the lake effect snowbelt south of Buffalo. But there are problems...
Green implies that the rest of the area including Buffalo (inside the dashed box) is not so bad. However, a look at the legend shows that green is up to 80 inches a year and the yellow that appears in many of the suburbs is 90-100 inches. Chautauqua County people may consider 80 inches to be minor but for the rest of us this color choice is terribly misleading.

The map also may need an update as parts of the region are getting half their average this week.
 Be "4 Warned" - this is another misleading map. How much snow will we see in Rochester? Apparently nothing even though family members tell us otherwise. The dropoff from 18-24" to nothing at the Livingston-Wyoming county line is remarkable as is the sudden lack of snow in Erie County, Pennsylvania. No data and no snow are not the same thing so don't treat them the same.

100 years ago today was the beginning of the Great Lakes Storm, the most deadly and destructive storm to ever hit the region. Also known as the "White Hurricane" because of the blinding snow that fell, the storm killed over 250 people, destroyed 19 ships and stranded 19 ships and some additional cargo barges. The storm raged for several days with a few lulls that only served to give false hope to stranded mariners. Most of the destruction occurred in Lake Huron. Wikipedia has this excellent map, originally from the USGS showing sunken ships in black and stranded ones in gray. Click for the original, more readable image.
The storm intensified and built up to hurricane force on November 9th. The US Weather Bureau only issued reports twice a day so most of this build up was not noted until too late. Cleveland saw 22 inches of snow and lost power for days as did much of the region. Breakwaters were destroyed in Chicago and Milwaukee.
   
There is a story on NPR's Morning Edition on the search for two ships in Lake Huron that have never been found. Another interesting account of the attempts by some crews to survive can be found in The Paragraph.

I found this on Meme Generator though I can't find the exact link anymore.

Here in the Northeast we are still dealing with the tail end of the Groundhog Day Storm-another week, another storm. This map posted yesterday on AccuWeather nicely shows how big this storm was (or still is up here) with advisories in 43 states.

Each color represents a different type of advisory and they range from severe thunderstorms to blizzards, gales, floods, wind, wind chill, marine warnings, high surf, dense fog, air stagnation and my personal favorite, heavy freezing spray.  I think that last one is along the lakes of northern Michigan but with so many colors it's tough to distinguish. The most common colors are the dark purply blue (winter storm), purply pink (blizzard), orange (wind chill) and the brown stuff in the south that I think is a wind advisory.

Despite the ugly projection, strange inclusion and exclusion of certain cities (especially in eastern Canada), and gratuitous topography that is easily mistaken for other weather patterns, the map still tells a pretty impressive story.  Punxsutawney Phil says early spring-yeah, right. Have fun digging!