The United States experiences every major category of natural hazard. Earthquakes shake the West Coast and the New Madrid fault zone. Wildfires burn millions of acres annually across the western states. Tornado Alley stretches from Texas to the Dakotas. Hurricane season threatens the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard from June through November. Volcanoes remain active in Hawaii, the Cascades, and Alaska. Floods, droughts, tsunamis, landslides, and winter storms round out the list.
The data for all of these hazards exists. Federal agencies like USGS, NOAA, NWS, and NIFC publish real-time feeds in machine-readable formats. But the data is scattered across different agencies, different websites, different formats, and different update schedules. If you want to see the current earthquake activity near your city and the nearest active wildfire on the same map, you have to visit two different websites and mentally overlay them.
Hazard Watch pulls all ten hazard categories into a single unified interface: one map, one consistent style, one staleness indicator.
Each hazard type has its own data pipeline, visual styling, and update cadence. Here is a summary:
| Hazard | Source | Update Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Earthquakes | USGS Earthquake Hazards | ~10 minutes |
| Wildfires | NIFC / IRWIN | ~30 minutes |
| Tornadoes | NWS Storm Prediction Center | ~15 minutes |
| Hurricanes | NOAA National Hurricane Center | ~6 hours |
| Volcanic Activity | Smithsonian GVP / USGS CVO | ~Daily |
| Floods | NWS River Forecast Centers | ~1 hour |
| Tsunamis | NOAA Tsunami Warning Centers | ~10 minutes |
| Landslides | USGS Landslide Hazards | ~Daily |
| Drought | US Drought Monitor | Weekly (Thursdays) |
| Winter Storms | NWS Weather Prediction Center | ~1 hour |
All ten hazard types render on a single interactive map. Each type has a distinct marker style: earthquakes use circles sized by magnitude, wildfires use flame-colored polygons sized by acreage, tornadoes use watch and warning polygons from the SPC, and so on. You can toggle any combination of layers to see exactly the hazard types you care about.
The map supports standard interactions: zoom, pan, click-for-detail. Clicking any hazard marker opens a detail panel with the raw data from the source agency—magnitude and depth for earthquakes, acreage and containment percentage for wildfires, Fujita-scale rating for tornadoes, category and projected track for hurricanes.
Real-time data is only useful if you know how current it is. Every data source in Hazard Watch carries a staleness indicator: a timestamp showing when the data was last successfully refreshed, color-coded green (current), yellow (slightly delayed), or red (significantly stale).
Staleness thresholds are calibrated to each data source's expected update frequency. Earthquake data that is 20 minutes old is flagged yellow because the USGS feed typically updates every 10 minutes. Drought data that is 5 days old is still green because the US Drought Monitor only publishes weekly. This prevents false alarms while ensuring that genuine data outages are surfaced immediately.
When a source goes stale, the corresponding map layer is not removed. The existing data remains visible but is marked with the stale timestamp, so you can still see the last known state while understanding that newer events may not be reflected.
The map is the primary interface, but Hazard Watch also provides city-level and state-level risk profiles. Select a city or state to see its historical exposure to each hazard type: how many earthquakes above M3 have occurred within 100 miles in the last year, how many wildfire acres have burned in the county, whether the area is in a FEMA-designated flood zone, and so on.
These profiles are not predictions. They are historical baselines that help contextualize the live data. If you see a M4.2 earthquake near Oklahoma City, the city profile tells you that this is not unusual—induced seismicity from wastewater injection has made central Oklahoma one of the most seismically active regions in the country over the past decade. If you see a similar earthquake near Chicago, the profile tells you that this is genuinely rare.
USGS Earthquake Hazards Program provides the most reliable real-time earthquake data in the world. Their GeoJSON feed includes all detected events globally, with magnitude, depth, location, and review status (automatic vs. human-reviewed). We filter to M2.5+ for the US map to avoid cluttering the display with microseisms that are not felt.
NIFC (National Interagency Fire Center) and the IRWIN (Integrated Reporting of Wildland-Fire Information) system provide active wildfire data including location, acreage, containment percentage, and the managing agency. During peak fire season, this feed can contain hundreds of active incidents simultaneously.
NOAA's National Weather Service powers tornado watches and warnings, winter storm advisories, and flood warnings through their alerts API. These are the same alerts that drive emergency broadcasts on television and mobile phones.
Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program maintains the definitive database of active volcanoes worldwide. We cross-reference their weekly volcanic activity reports with USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory data for US-specific volcanic hazards.
Natural hazards do not respect category boundaries. A major earthquake can trigger landslides. A hurricane brings both storm surge (flood) and tornado activity. A volcanic eruption can produce lahars (a type of landslide) and disrupt weather patterns that influence drought. Viewing all hazard types on a single map lets you see these compound risk scenarios that are invisible when each hazard type lives on its own website.
For people making decisions about where to live, how to prepare, or what risks to monitor, the value of a unified view is practical, not just aesthetic. You should not need to check five different federal websites to understand the natural hazard situation in your area.
Hazard Watch is live at hazards.terranalytics.com with continuous data refreshes and automatic staleness monitoring.