EarthNow

Straight from the source

Nothing made up. Nothing dressed up as live.

Every event names who reported it and how old that report is. EarthNow does not guess, predict or embellish; it shows what the people who measure the planet have published, then tells you plainly when it heard.

The volcano Purace in Colombia opened in the detail panel, its marker ringed on the globe among burnt ground in red: the weekly report's own account of the eruption, the provider GVP, when it was retrieved in UTC and in local time and a link to the source page.
One event in full, traced to the source that reported it.

USGS

Earthquakes from the United States Geological Survey, checked every minute.

NASA EONET

Wildfires, storms, floods, ice and more from NASA's Earth Observatory Natural Event Tracker, checked every ten minutes.

Smithsonian

The volcanoes in the Weekly Volcanic Activity Report, from the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program with the USGS, checked every hour.

EUMETSAT

The clouds, from EUMETSAT's world cloud map: a new picture from the ring of weather satellites every three hours, fetched only while the clouds are showing.

GWIS

The burnt ground, from the Global Wildfire Information System of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, mapped a day at a time and fetched only while the burnt areas are showing.

The globe is NASA's Blue Marble imagery, on this site as in the app; its night lights are NASA's Black Marble. None of NASA, the USGS, the Smithsonian, EUMETSAT or GWIS endorses EarthNow. It simply shows their public reports, credited.

Calm by design

It keeps quiet and keeps working.

What you can count on

  • Offline? Still useful. It opens on the last events it received and tells you how old they are. An answer it cannot read never wipes them.
  • One source down? The others carry on while it quietly tries again.
  • Honest about age. A source that has gone quiet is marked stale rather than passed off as current.
  • Private. No account, no sign-in, no telemetry. It talks to the sources above over https and nobody else; if you have named a proxy in the HTTPS_PROXY environment variable, it goes through that.

What it is not

  • A warning system. No alerts, no forecasts. For warnings, listen to your local authorities.
  • An archive. A week is as far back as it looks or replays.
  • A weather service. The clouds show where cloud lay; there is no rain, wind, temperature or forecast.
  • A mapping tool. No measurements, no projections.