You can use the Playback Manager to replay the data as it occurred. In the Playback Manager, you can set start and end times, the playback window of data to replay, the speed of the playback, and whether you want the data to replay in a continuous loop.

For more information on any item in the Playback Manager, you can click the question mark button and then the item to see the context sensitive help.

To open the Playback Manager, click the Playback Manager button on the Tracking Analyst toolbar.

You can deignate the layer, or layers, that will define the start and end times of the playback. This setting adjusts the start and end times of the playback window to include the temporal information for all data in the selected layer or layers. If you have added more than one temporal layer, you can set the temporal extent—start and end times—to all temporal layers, only those that are visible, or just a single layer.

You can change the Playback rate. In this example, the data will be played at a rate of 1 day per second.

When you click the Play button the data begins to replay on the map. The Playback Manager remains open, with a red line indicating progress of the playback.

You can speed up or slow down the playback rate by clicking and dragging the speed indicator in the center of the Playback Manager to the Slower or Faster setting. Click the Loop check box to play the data continuously.

The histogram at the top of the Playback Manager shows the amount of data available at a given time in the set temporal extent. You can click Hide Histogram to show the Playback Manager without the histogram.

You can change the Start, End, and Current times by clicking the dropdown arrows beside those fields, or you can click in the fields to edit the date and time settings directly.

If you want to nudge the playback forward or backward while not playing data, you can click on the Next and Previous buttons to the right of the histogram. These buttons adjust the current date being displayed by a set increment, determined by the playback rate, plus any adjustments made to the speed using the slider bar. You can only use the Next and Previous buttons when not playing data.

You can also affect data display by clicking and dragging the time indicator or by clicking on the histogram at any point, which will set that point to the current time.

Note: If you have applied labels to a layer, they will not display on the map when you click and drag the time indicator in this manner for performance reasons.