EarthNow v2.7.0

Release notes

A paused globe now shows when it will turn again

Touching the globe (a click, a drag, the wheel or a key) stops its slow rotation, then lets it turn again after ten seconds without input. Nothing on screen said so, so a globe stopped by a stray click looked stuck. Now a thin green bar along the foot of the globe empties over those ten seconds; when it runs out, the globe turns again. Touching the globe again refills it. The bar shows only while rotation is switched on; the help guide's entry for the rotate button describes it.

Shorter documentation

The project's documents (the README, the architecture, testing, development and decisions documents and the requirements specification) have been rewritten to about half their length, with every claim checked against the code as it stands.

EarthNow v2.6.0

Release notes

A feed EarthNow cannot read no longer wipes its events

If a source changed the shape of its feed so that none of its events could be read, EarthNow used to take that as the source having nothing to report: its events vanished from the globe, the copy kept for offline use was overwritten with nothing and the source was shown as fresh and healthy. Now such an answer counts as a failed fetch for USGS, EONET and the volcano report alike. The last good events stay on the globe and on disk; the provider status says what went wrong and when the next attempt is.

The status says when some events could not be read

When a source's answer holds items EarthNow cannot use, the provider status panel now says how many; the status button shows its dot. Before, that count reached only the log.

A cache warning goes away once saving works again

If the events could not be saved for offline use (a locked file, say), the warning used to stay for the rest of the run even after later saves succeeded. It now clears on that source's next good save. A warning about one source is no longer replaced by another's; each is shown until its own source saves again.

Raising the minimum magnitude applies at once, even offline

Choosing a higher minimum magnitude in Settings used to leave smaller quakes on the globe until USGS next answered, which never happened while offline and carried over to the next start. The globe now shows only quakes at or above the minimum straight away. The smaller ones are still kept on disk, so lowering the minimum again brings them back without a fetch.

Every request stays on https and on its own source

EarthNow already refused to follow a redirect to any host outside its list. It now also refuses any request or redirect over plain http, so event data cannot be sent unencrypted where it could be altered on the way. Each source also has a connection of its own that reaches only its own host, so one source's redirect can no longer reach the cloud or burnt-area service while that layer is hidden. If you have set a proxy in the HTTPS_PROXY environment variable, EarthNow's requests go through it, as before; the documentation now says so.

EarthNow v2.5.0

Release notes

The website has a page for each part

The site at earthnow.world was one long page; it is now four. Home keeps the first look at the globe and the support section; Features holds the feature cards with the day and night and cloud screenshots; Why says where the events come from and what EarthNow is not; Install has the downloads for Windows, macOS and Linux. Every section kept its wording. The navigation and the footer lead to the pages; the footer's link to ernster.dev now reads More of my work.

The site always pairs a page with its own stylesheet

Each page links its stylesheet with a fingerprint of the file's content, so a browser fetches the new stylesheet the moment it changes rather than pairing a fresh page with a cached old one.

The feature and source cards are back in their grid

On the last release's site the feature cards and the source cards had lost their grid layout: a style rule meant for the version label had taken theirs over. They are laid out in a grid again, as many to a row as fit.

The site's donate button wears the shared mark

The donate button on the home page now carries the same small mark every one of my project sites uses, in place of a larger render of its own. It is drawn at the same height as before.

The decisions EarthNow rests on are written down

A new document in the repository, DECISIONS-TRADEOFFS.md, sets out each deliberate choice the product makes: what was chosen, what was turned down, what it gains and what it costs. The README links it. The developer documents also now describe the site as the four pages it is.

The application itself is unchanged in this release.

EarthNow v2.4.1

Release notes

Volcano reports read without stray question marks

A volcano's detail could read "Karangetang?s North Crater" or "sulfur dioxide
(SO?)". The Smithsonian's weekly report is published in an older character set
that holds neither the curly apostrophe nor the small 2 of SO₂, so the feed
itself carries a question mark in their place. EarthNow now puts those two
back, reading "Karangetang’s North Crater" and "(SO₂)". Every other question
mark stays exactly as the report wrote it.

EarthNow v2.4.0

Release notes

Markers draw whole at the globe's edge

Near the edge of the globe, markers and cluster badges were drawn cut in half:
an emoji or a count badge lost its lower part as it turned towards the far
side. Each marker is a flat picture that always faces you, so near the edge it
stood upright on the surface and its lower half sank into the globe, which hid
it.

Markers are now drawn over the globe, so every one shows whole up to the
horizon. One that passes behind the globe is hidden at once rather than being
sliced away as it goes.

EarthNow v2.3.0

Release notes

Volcanoes show again, as still erupting

Volcanoes could vanish from the globe entirely: every time window read 0
volcanoes while the Smithsonian and USGS weekly report listed twenty erupting.
Each volcano was dated by the day its report came out, so once that day slipped
out of the chosen window the volcano went with it, although the report says the
activity continues. The 24 hour window showed volcanoes only on the day a
report appeared.

A volcano in the latest weekly report now counts as erupting now, so it shows
in whichever window you choose. Its detail reads, for example, "Continuing:
report for 10 to 16 Sep 2026, issued 17 Sep 2026", in place of a time the
source never gave. In a replay a volcano appears from the first day of the week
its report covers.

The report is published weekly. If the newest one is more than 14 days old,
because the source has stopped or fallen behind, its volcanoes are no longer
shown and the provider status says why, rather than showing a stale eruption
for ever. One late report never empties the globe.

Landslides, drought and dust haze are filed under Other

The key listed landslides, drought and dust haze, which always read 0: NASA's
EONET, the only source for them, published none in the past year. Those rows
have gone, so the key lists the seven kinds of event the sources actually
report. Should EONET publish one of them, it appears under Other, which also
holds the USGS's quarry blasts and explosions. If you had hidden one of those
three rows, "All events" may show as active until you press it once.

EarthNow v2.2.0

Release notes

Replay: a way back to now with a choice of speed

Time travel is now something you start and end on purpose. Once a replay is
under way it stays there: when playback reaches the end of the window it holds
on that last moment, paused. Dragging the slider to its right end keeps you in
the replay too. A Now button appears at the end of the top bar while you are
replaying; press it and the globe is back in the present. Choosing another time
window still returns you to the present as well.

A speed button beside the slider plays the window at half, normal or double
speed: a whole pass takes a minute, thirty seconds or fifteen. Half speed suits
following a storm across an ocean over a week; double suits a quick look at a
short window. The speed you pick is remembered.

EarthNow v2.1.0

Release notes

Rotation starts from the whole globe

When the globe starts turning again, it first eases back to its usual size, so
the whole Earth turns rather than whatever close-up you left it at. That holds
whether you had zoomed in on an event or out into space. It holds too whether
rotation came back by itself after ten seconds or you pressed Start rotating. It keeps
facing the same place while it eases back, then turns from there. Touch the
globe while it is on its way and it stops where it is.

EarthNow v2.0.0

Release notes

Day and night

The globe is now lit by the real sun. A new button on the rail, straight after
the clouds, shows or hides the layer. It shows from the first run, including
for anyone updating. The night side darkens and NASA's Black Marble city
lights show through it; dawn and dusk fade across a twilight band that moves
with the sun, a quarter of a degree a minute.

The sun's place is worked out on your own machine from the time, by NOAA's
solar position equations, so the layer makes no request and works without a
connection. The city lights are a 2016 composite: they show where cities are,
not which lights are on tonight. The guide says so. With the clouds shown too,
clouds over the night side are drawn fainter, so they never glow white against
the dark.

Opens over your part of the world

At launch the globe now faces your own country, as your computer's country or
region setting names it, then starts turning from there. The setting is read
on your machine and sent nowhere. Where it names no country, the globe opens as
before.

Earthquake depth

An earthquake's detail now gives its depth with USGS's own band: shallow
down to 70 km, intermediate down to 300 km, deep below that. A quake beneath high ground can sit
above sea level, which the row says in those words. When USGS cannot compute a
depth it assigns 10 km, so a depth of exactly 10 km is marked as often fixed
rather than measured; the guide explains it. Nothing changes on the globe
itself.

Storm tracks

A storm now draws a faint track behind its marker: the positions its source
gave inside the chosen time window, strongest at the marker. It shows where
the storm has been, never where it is going. A box in Settings hides the
tracks.

Burnt areas

Burnt ground now shows in red, worldwide, from the Global Wildfire Information
System, lying beneath the clouds and the markers. Every day the chosen time
window touches is drawn, so 7 days shows eight days of maps; a short window may
have none mapped yet and says so. The maps are fetched only while shown and
kept for use without a connection. The layer shows from the first run; a box
in Settings hides it.

Replay

Play, beside the time window, replays the chosen window in 30 seconds: events
appear at their own times, storm tracks grow, the sun sweeps round, the burnt
days build up and the clouds move. The slider beside it moves through the
window by hand; its right end is now. Replay's clouds are smaller images
fetched for it and let go when it ends. It shows what the sources hold now
about those days, which may since have been revised.

Fixed: a cluster that would not open

Two events close enough together stayed one cluster however far you zoomed, so
neither could be opened with the pointer. Activating a cluster at the closest
zoom now lists its members; choosing one opens its detail.

The window

The smallest window is now 960 by 700, up from 960 by 640, to make room for
the new rail button.

EarthNow v1.0.0

Release notes

The clouds

A new button on the rail, straight after rotation, lays the clouds over the
globe as weather satellites last saw them. The image is EUMETSAT's world cloud
map: a mosaic of infrared images from several satellites, made every three
hours. Each pixel's brightness sets how opaque its cloud is drawn, between two
thresholds measured against EUMETSAT's own cloud mask over a week of images.
The clouds turn with the globe and sit beneath every marker.

The line beneath the globe gives the image's time in UTC with its age, for
example "Clouds: image of 15:00 UTC, 3 h ago". It marks the image stale once it
is more than nine hours old. A grey veil marks where no satellite sees, mostly
near the poles, so an unseen region never reads as a clear sky. The guide says
what the layer shows and its one limit: an infrared image sees temperature, so
snow, ice and cold high ground can read as cloud.

The layer starts hidden. Nothing is fetched from EUMETSAT until it is shown;
while shown, EarthNow checks once an hour for a newer image and fetches one
only when there is one. The last image is kept on disk, so the clouds still
show without a connection, marked with their age. A failed fetch keeps the
image already held and says why in the provider status popover, under
EUMETSAT.

The window

The smallest window is now 960 by 640, to make room for the new button.

Home

EarthNow's site now lives at https://earthnow.world/.