Data sources

Current conditions and forecasts come from Open-Meteo, which blends national weather service models. Air quality comes from the Open-Meteo air quality API, built on the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). Data is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Open-Meteo updates current conditions every 15 minutes and air quality hourly. Your browser asks for fresh readings on that same rhythm while the page is open, and the server keeps an hourly cached copy for first loads. Refreshing more often would return identical numbers.

Cities are the largest in each independent country, then filled to 260 by population with at most five per country. City names and populations come from GeoNames via the all-the-cities package.

All 9 indicators come from World Bank Open Data (CC BY 4.0): gdp per capita, gdp growth, population, life expectancy, unemployment, inflation, internet users, co2 per capita, renewable energy.

The World Bank publishes these annually, so each country shows its latest reported year, which can differ between countries and indicators. Colour scales clip the top and bottom 5% on linear indicators so a few outliers do not flatten everyone else; GDP and population use a log scale.

Country shapes come from Natural Earth via world-atlas. Very small states are drawn as points.

Earthquakes come from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program monthly feed of magnitude 4.5 and above, which USGS regenerates every minute. OrbitalSpace checks it every minute while the page is open. Tsunami flags and PAGER alerts are exactly what USGS publishes; they are not warnings. For safety guidance always use your national tsunami warning centre.

Wildfires, severe storms, volcanoes and sea ice come from NASA EONET, which curates events from agencies such as JTWC, InciWeb and the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program. OrbitalSpace checks it every 30 minutes.

The Earth on the home page is wrapped in NASA Visible Earth imagery: Blue Marble Next Generation for daytime and Black Marble 2016 for night lights. Full disc photographs come from the DSCOVR EPIC camera. Hurricane Helene, city lights and the Sarychev Peak eruption were photographed by astronauts aboard the International Space Station and published in the NASA Image and Video Library. NASA imagery is not subject to copyright in the United States; OrbitalSpace is not endorsed by NASA.

Every layer falls back to the last saved snapshot, which is rebuilt daily. The status line then switches from “Live” to the snapshot date, so stale data is never presented as live.