My dad used to work in a TV station's meteorology department. He is also a math teacher. He used some of the animation software (running on Irix on SGI O2's at the time, if I remember right) and green screen for weather reports to make math videos for his students, long before YouTube.

I was able to pick up that software and start making animations during a tour I got of the studio. The tools were designed to allow linking objects, paths, and animations in a very intuitive way.

See if you can find a demo of some of those weather animation user interfaces as there is probably good inspiration there.