Severe Weather and Natural Disasters
Date:
tune
Continents in World
World
Drought
Droughts are measured using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which quantifies the precipitation deficit at a given location for a set timescale. Places where the 9-month SPI was less than -1.5 are considered to be experiencing drought. We source drought data from NOAA.
Date:
tune
Fires
Fire detection is based on both dispatcher reporting and VIIRS active fire detection, which uses satellite imaging to identify fires based on thermal readings. We source fire data from NASA and WFIGS.
Date:
tune
Floods
Flood detection is based on satellite imagery from Dynamic World.
Date:
tune
Storms
Cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons are different names for the same weather phenomenon: a rotating storm with extreme wind speeds and torrential rain. We source our storm data from NOAA.
Date:
tune
Wet bulb
Wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which an object can cool down when moisture evaporates from it. It measures how well our bodies cool down by sweating when it’s hot and humid. The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C. The data is generated by Data Commons using the web-bulb temperature data from NASA's MERRA-2 dataset on Google Earth Engine.
Date:
tune