Data Sources
Every 15 minutes, our system fetches data from 10 different international agencies. Earthquakes come from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) and EMSC (European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre). Wildfire data is processed from NASA FIRMS satellite imagery. Weather alerts are pulled from NOAA (US), MeteoAlarm (Europe), and the UK Environment Agency. Multi-risk events such as hurricanes, floods, and volcanic activity are aggregated from GDACS and EONET.
Data Processing
Each data source uses a different format: GeoJSON for earthquakes, CSV for wildfires, XML for GDACS, plain JSON for others. Our sync layer normalises everything into a single internal format with severity levels (light, minor, moderate, severe, extreme). Events are deduplicated, geocoded to their country, and stored in cell-based geographic shards for fast map queries.
The Map
The interactive map is built from scratch using HTML5 Canvas — no Leaflet, no Google Maps. We render OpenStreetMap tiles and overlay disaster markers coloured by severity. The map supports street, satellite, dark, light, and topo views. Clustering groups events when zoomed out to keep the map readable.
Weather & Forecasts
Current weather data is fetched from OpenWeatherMap or WeatherAPI and cached for 30 minutes. Forecasts come from Open-Meteo and are updated every 6 hours. The kite map uses a separate wind forecast endpoint combining WeatherAPI, Open-Meteo, and OpenWeatherMap in cascade.
Radio Stations
Over 30,000 radio stations from Radio Browser API are indexed by location and tag. You can search for stations broadcasting near any place on the map, listen directly in the browser, and save favourites.
Performance & Cost
We use no databases — everything is file-based using JSON and NDJSON with geographic cell sharding for speed. This makes the platform cheap to run and easy to deploy. There are no paywalls, no ads, and no registration required. A migration plan to MySQL/MariaDB exists for future scalability.