State of the world: The Real Data

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This page collects links to raw and live sources on how well the planet, including its vital infrastructure, is doing right now, potentially visualised attractively. But the key thing is, we want Real Data, from the most direct sources.

Sources are expected to be realtime or at least updated frequently. Mere estimates of things based on questionable inputs are explicitly not welcome, no matter how pretty their output.

Please submit new links or fixes to @bert_hu_bert or bert@hubertnet.nl. At the bottom of this page you can find what the ideal link looks like

Space

Weather

Also see Climate/Environment below.

Water

Leap seconds / Earth Rotation

Astronomy / solar system

Big science

Navigation / Time

Airflight

Internet

Focus on links that help tell “is it just me or is something broken”.

Medical / epidemics / influenza

These graphs are quite morbid (literally) but will tell you if something is going on:

Environment/Climate

Earthquakes, tsunamis

Power generation, distribution

Rationale

The world abounds in sources of data. There are more databases, interactive graphs and dashboards than anyone could ever hope to understand.

The ideal link for this page provides live data that is relevant to questions like “x doesn’t work very well today, is it just me?”, or “I read about incident y in the news, but I’d like to see some live data for myself to understand what is going on”.

To be of use, a link should not just have the data, we should be able to find actionable stuff relatively easily. So for example, the EU Copernicus Open Access Hub is not itself a good resource for this page. It contains all the data in the world (literally), but it requires a lot of learning to figure out where it is.

However, a deep link into the world of Copernicus showing us a map of NOx concentrations measured this week would be a great addition to the list.

So while we do appreciate access to professional data that takes time to get used to, we need to guide the visitor along to some “good stuff” from where they can perhaps go on to learning all about the resource.

In addition to the above, links to (near-)primary data are most appreciated. Lots of raw data is processed and “improved” by commercial operators, sometimes to function as “click bait”. That is not what we need.