Weather and disasters

SENTINEL treats weather and natural disasters with the same operational lens it applies to conflict events: things that move fast, things that have a position on the globe, and things that need a clear distinction between routine activity and a step-change worth flagging. The weather pack renders five distinct layers, each with its own polling cadence and severity grading.

Tropical cyclones come from two complementary sources. The National Hurricane Center publishes Atlantic, East Pacific, and Central Pacific cones with five-day track forecasts; SENTINEL renders these as graded polygons with the labelled position marker. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center covers the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Hemisphere with the same shape of advisory; storms in those basins render as labelled position markers prefixed with JTWC so the source is unambiguous. Combined, the coverage is genuinely worldwide.

Severe weather alerts from the National Weather Service Common Alerting Protocol feed render as severity-shaded polygons across the United States and territories. Tornado warnings, hurricane warnings, blizzard warnings, and the long tail of less-cited categories all appear on the same renderer with different colour codes. The polygon geometry is the actual issuing geometry; an analyst can see exactly which counties are under watch.

Volcanic ash advisories from the nine regional Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres render as ash-cloud polygons. The active volcanoes layer renders triangle markers per Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program weekly bulletin entry, colour-coded by aviation colour code (red, orange, yellow, green, unassigned). For US volcanoes the official colour comes from the United States Geological Survey; for non-US volcanoes the activity status text drives the assignment.

Earthquakes pull from the USGS feed with a magnitude floor of 5.5. Each event renders as a circle whose colour is bucketed by magnitude (from extreme M9.0+ down to light M5.5+). M7.0+ events trigger the alert system. Tsunami warnings render as their own layer, severity-shaded ellipses at the generating-quake epicentre with a label naming the affected region. The tsunami layer refreshes every five minutes, the most time-critical hazard the platform shows.

Wildfire detections are NASA FIRMS thermal anomalies with the routine-flare filter applied. The detection floor is 10 megawatts of fire radiative power. Detections at named infrastructure (refineries, power plants, terminals, military and naval bases, capitals, major cities) surface ahead of plain wildfires, with the matched site name and distance shown on the fire card. The 24-hour freshness cap and the strategic-relevance ranking are deliberate, the operator wants the recent fire at the refinery, not last week's hectare in the bush.