{
    "dataset": "sources",
    "name": "Sources and what each one covers",
    "generated_at": "2026-10-19T18:55:44+00:00",
    "licence": "CC BY 4.0",
    "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "upstream": "The licence above covers the counts, which this site computed. It does not cover the underlying observations: those belong to the agencies named on each row, and their own terms apply if you go to them directly.",
    "read_this_first": "These are counts of what this site RECORDED, not counts of what happened. Coverage is uneven: a country with dense seismic instrumentation produces more recorded earthquakes than one without, at the same real rate. Read them as a record of monitoring, not as a measurement of the world.",
    "source": "https://worldnaturaldisasters.com/datasets",
    "row_count": 12,
    "row_cap": 50000,
    "truncated": false,
    "data": [
        {
            "source_key": "nws",
            "name": "US National Weather Service",
            "class": "warning",
            "rates_severity": "yes",
            "limitation": "Covers the United States only. It publishes nothing about any other country, so its absence from a country page is not an outage."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "gdacs",
            "name": "GDACS (European Commission / United Nations)",
            "class": "warning",
            "rates_severity": "yes",
            "limitation": "Global, but deliberately selective: it alerts on disasters likely to need INTERNATIONAL response. Serious local flooding that a national agency handles alone will not appear here."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "usgs",
            "name": "US Geological Survey",
            "class": "measurement",
            "rates_severity": "no",
            "limitation": "Global for earthquakes above roughly M4.5, and denser where there are more seismometers. It publishes nothing about any other hazard."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "emsc",
            "name": "European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre",
            "class": "measurement",
            "rates_severity": "no",
            "limitation": "Global for earthquakes, with the best coverage in Europe and the Mediterranean. It publishes nothing about any other hazard."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "firms",
            "name": "NASA FIRMS",
            "class": "detection",
            "rates_severity": "no",
            "limitation": "Global, but it sees only what the satellite saw on its pass, and thick cloud hides fire. A quiet day here is not evidence that nothing burned."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "eonet",
            "name": "NASA EONET",
            "class": "detection",
            "rates_severity": "no",
            "limitation": "Global and curated rather than automatic, so it is slower than the raw feeds and carries far fewer events."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "wmo",
            "name": "WMO Alert Hub (national weather services)",
            "class": "warning",
            "rates_severity": "yes",
            "limitation": "Each warning comes from one country own alerting authority, so the scale is that agency scale and is not comparable between countries. Many agencies publish no coordinates, and those warnings are placed at the centre of the country rather than where the weather is - the area name is the real answer."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "meteoalarm",
            "name": "MeteoAlarm (EUMETNET)",
            "class": "warning",
            "rates_severity": "yes",
            "limitation": "Europe only. It publishes no coordinates at all, so every warning here is placed at the centre of its country and the area name is the only reliable indication of where it applies."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "tsunami",
            "name": "NOAA Tsunami Warning Centers",
            "class": "warning",
            "rates_severity": "yes",
            "limitation": "These two centres warn for the US and Canadian coasts and for the Pacific and Caribbean basins. The Indian Ocean and Mediterranean have their own warning centres, which are not read here. Their routine information statements - the ones that say there is NO tsunami danger - are deliberately not imported, so an empty tsunami list means no threat was issued, not that nothing was checked."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "usgs_volcano",
            "name": "USGS Volcano Hazards Program",
            "class": "warning",
            "rates_severity": "yes",
            "limitation": "United States volcanoes only - Alaska, Hawaii, the Cascades, Yellowstone, California and the Northern Mariana Islands. It says nothing about Indonesia, Iceland, Italy or anywhere else, so its silence about a foreign eruption is not a judgement about that eruption."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "nhc",
            "name": "NOAA National Hurricane Center",
            "class": "measurement",
            "rates_severity": "no",
            "limitation": "The Atlantic and the eastern and central Pacific only. No typhoon in the western Pacific and no cyclone in the Indian Ocean or the southern hemisphere appears here; those come from GDACS and from national services."
        },
        {
            "source_key": "reliefweb",
            "name": "ReliefWeb (UN OCHA)",
            "class": "report",
            "rates_severity": "no",
            "limitation": "Global, but it reports on humanitarian RESPONSE. It arrives days after an event rather than during it, and never functions as a warning."
        }
    ]
}