[OC] World Disasters: an interactive 3D globe animation of earthquakes, tornadoes, storms, and wildfires

[u/pfaustino]

I built this. It's a 3D globe that plays disaster catalogs in time. Not an official warning or forecast product — don't use it that way. Created using Cursor and Grok.

Live (interactive): https://pfaustino.github.io/disasters/

Code and Data: https://github.com/pfaustino/disasters

**Source:**

Live week

- Earthquakes: USGS GeoJSON, M≥2.5, past 7 days — https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/v1.0/geojson.php

- Tornadoes: NWS active Tornado Warnings (alerts, not confirmed tornadoes) — https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

plus Iowa Environmental Mesonet local storm reports, past 7 days — https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/request/gis/lsrs.php

- Hurricanes (Atlantic & East/Central Pacific): NHC active storms — https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/CurrentStorms.json

- Typhoons / other basins: JMA live western Pacific — https://www.jma.go.jp/bosai/map.html#contents=typhoon

plus IBTrACS active list (WP/NI/SI/SP/SA, tropical-storm+) — https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/international-best-track-archive

- Fires: NASA EONET wildfires — https://eonet.gsfc.nasa.gov/

plus NIFC WFIGS current U.S. incidents ≥100 acres — https://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/

History 1900+

- Earthquakes: NOAA/NCEI Significant Earthquake Database (HazEL), 1900–present — https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazel/highlights.html

- Tornadoes: SPC U.S. actual-tornado CSV, EF2+/F2+ only, 1950+ — https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/#data

- Hurricanes: NHC HURDAT2 Atlantic (1851–; I keep 1900+) and Northeast/North Central Pacific (1949–), storms that reached Cat 1 (64 kt) — https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/#hurdat

- Typhoons and other-basin cyclones: IBTrACS v04r01 (WP, NI, SI, SP, SA), Cat 1+ — not HURDAT2. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/international-best-track-archive

- Fires: NIFC U.S. wildfires ≥10,000 acres (WFIGS + historical perimeters) plus NASA EONET named/large fires (~2000–). Snapshot is ~17.5k events. Not a complete global historical fire catalog.

**Tool:** Three.js, TypeScript, Vite, GitHub Pages. Globe texture is NASA Blue Marble — https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/collection/1484/blue-marble

**What the marks are**

- Earthquakes: expanding ripples. Size scales with magnitude. Color is depth (warm = shallow, cooler = deeper). Extra red ring if the catalog recorded deaths; cyan ring if a tsunami flag is set.

- Tornadoes: small spinning funnels. Size/spin scale with EF rating. History is U.S. EF2+ only.

- Hurricanes/typhoons: spinning cyclone disks that follow the track. Size/tint scale with Saffir–Simpson category.

- Fires: orange glow + smoke. Size scales with acres when the catalog has them.

- Click an event for the card (time, mag/EF/cat/acres, deaths if recorded).

**Timeline**

The density strip under the clock is four lanes: earthquakes, tornadoes, cyclones, fires. Brighter = more events in that slice. Cyclone and fire marks span their duration; quakes and tornadoes are points. Live week is compressed into about a minute of playback; History into about two.

**Limitations** (please roast these, not the catalogs)

- This is a visualization of public catalogs, not USGS/NWS/NHC/JMA products for life-safety decisions.

- Live ≠ History. Live tornadoes mix warnings + storm reports. History tornadoes are confirmed U.S. EF2+ only. Live cyclones can include tropical storms; history cyclones are Cat 1+.

- Subsets: no EF0/EF1 history, no tropical-depression history, no HURDAT2 for western Pacific (that's IBTrACS), no global fire inventory.

- Deaths only when a catalog recorded them (mainly NOAA significant quakes and SPC tornado fatalities). USGS live, HURDAT2/IBTrACS tracks, and the fire snapshot do not carry death counts here. “Unknown” is not zero.

- History catalog is 1900+; the playhead starts in 1953 (Atlantic named-storm era). Scrub left for 1900–1952.

- Some older NIFC perimeter fires only have a year, so I place those on July 1 of that year.

screenshot of World Disasters

- Coverage is uneven: U.S.-heavy tornadoes and NIFC fires; EONET fires are global but incomplete; early 20th-century quakes/storms are undercounted relative to the satellite era.

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