Glossary

An audit of the map counted twenty-two things a reader had to guess at: a number after “CS:”, a shield with a digit in it, a dot whose size meant something. They are all defined below. So is the half nobody asks for — what this site does not measure, which is the part worth reading before you rely on anything here.

Reading the map

Everything the live map draws, and what each mark stands for.

Colour: Severity, and nothing else. Green is low, amber medium, orange high, red critical. No other meaning is carried by colour anywhere on this site.
Size of a dot: The Calamity Score of that event, 0–100. A bigger dot is a higher score, not a bigger fire.
CS: 72 — Calamity Score: The Calamity Score of that event. Four components: intensity (40 %), population exposure (30 %), cascade probability (20 %) and historical context (10 %).
A white ring: The event you currently have open. It is a cursor, not a property of the event.
◉ 2 — source shield: How many INDEPENDENT ORGANISATIONS reported the event. Counted in organisations, not in feeds: fifteen of our fetchers call one USGS service, eight of them under the name of a national agency, and all fifteen together are one source.
⚠ — cascade: A secondary hazard this event could trigger — a tsunami after an earthquake, a landslide after rain. It is a probability we compute, not a warning anyone has issued.
12–72 h: How long an event stays on the live map, by type: earthquakes 12 h, wildfires and cyclones 48 h, outbreaks and volcanic unrest 72 h. Older events remain in the archive; they leave the map.
Kp / G: The NOAA geomagnetic-storm scales. Kp runs 0–9 and measures the disturbance of the magnetic field; G1–G5 is the public impact scale derived from it.
The dark side of the globe: The real night side of the Earth at the time you are looking. The lights are NASA city-lights imagery, not live data.

The measurements

The units and abbreviations that come from the sources, kept in the sources' own terms.

FRP — Fire Radiative Power, in megawatts (MW): The radiant heat a satellite measures coming off a fire at the instant it passes overhead. It is a measure of how hard the fire is burning, not of how much has burned.
Fire pixels: How many satellite pixels flagged as burning were grouped into this one event. A pixel is about 375 m across for VIIRS and about 1 km for MODIS.
M (magnitude): Moment magnitude for earthquakes, as published by the reporting agency. It is logarithmic: M6 releases about 32 times the energy of M5.
AQI — Air Quality Index: A national index, usually the US EPA scale, derived from pollutant concentrations. 0–50 good, 51–100 moderate, 101–150 unhealthy for sensitive groups, above 300 hazardous.
PM2.5: Particulate matter below 2,5 micrometres, in micrograms per cubic metre. The pollutant most AQI values are driven by.
µSv/h: Microsieverts per hour, a dose rate. Natural background is roughly 0,05–0,2 µSv/h depending on where you stand.
CAP — Common Alerting Protocol: The international XML format national weather and civil-protection agencies publish official warnings in. Most of the warnings on this site arrive as CAP.
CFI — Calamity Forecast Index: Our own 7-day, per-country risk estimate. It is a model output, not a forecast issued by any agency.
Exposed population: An estimate of how many people live inside the impact radius of an event, from a gridded population dataset. It is a count of RESIDENTS, never a count of people affected, injured or killed.

What we do not measure

This is the important section. Everything on this site is an aggregation of other people’s measurements, and the honest limits of that are these.

A satellite detection is not a confirmed fire: FIRMS reports thermal anomalies. Most are wildfires; some are flares, furnaces, controlled burns or sun glint. We publish what the satellite measured and name it as a detection. Nobody has been to look.
We do not verify anything ourselves: We aggregate 185 public scientific feeds and compare them with each other. We have no sensors, no observers and no field staff. When we say an event is confirmed, we mean that more than one independent organisation reported it.
We do not count casualties: No number on this site is a death toll or an injury count unless the source we name published one, and then it is theirs. The exposure figure is residents inside a radius.
A ranking is a ranking inside our archive: When a page says an event is the strongest recorded within 20 km since a date, it means the strongest IN OUR RECORD, which begins in March 2026 and has gaps we list. It is not a statement about history.
We do not issue warnings: Nothing here is an official alert. When an agency has issued one we republish it and link to the source; act on the agency, not on us. Our own alert emails tell you something was reported, not what to do.
"Near" means within 30 km: A place name on an event page is the nearest settlement we hold, and we only call it "near" when it is within 30 km. Beyond that we print the distance instead of the word.
Timing is the source’s, and sources are late: Satellite fire data can be three to twenty-four hours behind the fire. Every page prints when the source reported, not when we fetched, and says how old that is.

Where the numbers come from

The scoring rules are set out on the methodology page, the longer explanations are in Learn, and the API that serves the same fields is documented under Docs. Every event page names the organisation that reported it and links to that organisation’s own record.