Keeping track of disaster

World map with icons displaying current natural and man-made disasters

The National Association of Radio Distress-Signalling and Infocommunications (RSOE) that maintains a web page showing world-wide disasters (the Alert Map). The above image is a screen grab of part of that page, you can click on it to get a larger view.

You can click on an icon at the RSOE Alert Map page to get information on what the disaster is, and then drill down into the data to get even more information. For example, from the screen shown above I can discover that there has been a head-on crash with a bus in Northern Nigeria which killed 18 people, that there are 34 wildfires burning in Siberia (the details even link to images of the fires), and that a 58 year old man in Santa Fe, New Mexico is in a hospital and recovering from a case of the bubonic plague.

Passing storm front

You can also zoom in on continents and regions to get an even more detailed view of what's going on. The small image to the left is  showing the Florida peninsula. It shows the weather system that passed over my house a while ago, and the associated severe weather warnings across the State.

The RSOE Alert Map page also has lists of current emergencies, short term events and links to free data bases, useful information and help screens explaining the icons.

For those who worry about such things, RSOE also maintains a Climate Map where you can view heat waves, droughts, storms, melting ice caps and the like as you fret about the carbon you are exhaling.