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), including the CAMS European air quality forecasts (ENSEMBLE data). Open-Meteo data is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Air quality contains modified Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service information 2026. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains.

Open-Meteo updates current weather every 15 minutes. Air quality arrives as hourly values from CAMS forecasts that are rerun every 12 hours for the world and every 24 hours for Europe. While the page is open and visible, your browser asks for fresh weather about every 15 minutes and fresh air quality every hour, and the server keeps a copy for up to an hour 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.

Measured PM2.5 comes from OpenAQ, which gathers readings from government monitors and other air quality sensors, each under its original provider's licence. OrbitalSpace checks OpenAQ once a day and gives each city the nearest monitor or sensor within 25 km that had reported in the six hours before that check, with the time of the reading. Readings more than 36 hours old are hidden; many cities have none.

“Today vs normal” compares today's mean temperature (the forecast high plus low, halved) with the 1991 to 2020 average for the same month at a nearby weather station (at least ten years of that month between 1991 and 2020), from the Global Summary of the Month in NOAA NCEI Climate Data Online. Averages are worked out once and stored; cities without a suitable station nearby show no value.

15 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, income inequality, fertility rate, urban population, access to electricity, mobile subscriptions, trade.

Inflation, IMF estimate and Government debt come from the IMF World Economic Outlook (Source: International Monetary Fund). They are IMF estimates for the current year and change when the IMF publishes a new outlook.

World market prices (oil, gas, wheat, copper, commodity indexes and the euro) come from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which republishes them from the US Energy Information Administration, the IMF and the Federal Reserve. Oil, gas and the euro are daily prices; wheat, copper and the commodity indexes are monthly. OrbitalSpace reads them once a day and shows the date of each price. This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

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 and visible. 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. It shows only the 400 most recently updated open wildfires, not every open fire EONET lists.

Floods, tropical cyclones and droughts come from GDACS, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System of the United Nations and the European Commission, with data from the European Commission Joint Research Centre. OrbitalSpace shows the events GDACS marks as current, with the green, orange or red alert level GDACS gives each one, and checks every 30 minutes. Alert levels estimate likely humanitarian impact; they are not official warnings.

Space weather is the planetary K index from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center: the latest observed or estimated three hour value, with NOAA's G1 to G5 storm level when one is under way.

Satellite fire detections come from NASA FIRMS (VIIRS on NOAA-20, the 24 hours before OrbitalSpace's daily check). We acknowledge the use of data from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System, part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System. Low confidence detections are left out, nearby detections are grouped into half degree cells, and the 300 cells with the most fire power are shown.

Asteroid close approaches for the next seven days come from NASA NeoWs, which mirrors JPL's small body data. “Potentially hazardous” is NASA's classification by size and orbit, not a prediction of impact. OrbitalSpace reads it once a day.

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. While a layer is live, the status line always shows how long ago its data updated.