Links worth watching

Sites I watch, and learned from · Observed State

I like visualisations. Long before this site existed I had the habit of opening a tab and just watching the world move: planes over the Atlantic, a storm turning, lightning striking in real time.

These 36 sites are my favourites. None of them is mine.

If a link is broken or has changed, please let me know.

The Earth, live

• zoom.earth Live weather satellite
• NASA Worldview Scientific satellite, several views of the planet
• NOAA GOES GOES satellite, the best live loops
• FIRMS NASA Fire hotspots and exactly where they are

Air and sea

• flightradar24.com The king of air traffic
• soaratlas.com An atlas of aerial maps and photos, with good case studies
• marinetraffic.com The king of maritime traffic
• vesselfinder.com Interesting detail on every ship's route
• globalfishingwatch.org A global map of fishing activity

Weather, rain and storms

• windy.com The dashboard every newsroom loves
• Meteoblue A professional weather lab
• Earth.nullschool.net A good way to see the waves
• lightningmaps.org Live lightning map

Ground that moves

• earthquake.usgs.gov Global earthquakes
• VolcanoDiscovery Volcanic activity
• GDACS Global disasters

Infrastructure

• submarinecablemap.com Submarine cables
• Cloudflare Radar The pulse of the internet, and where it is going down
• PowerOutage.us Power outages in the US
• Safecast A live radiation map, made by people

Sky

• eyes.nasa.gov The solar system, and the Sun
• stellarium-web.org Tonight's sky, the best one for constellations
• timeanddate.com Eclipses and solar events, among other data

Data and visualisation

• worldometers.info The world in numbers
• ourworldindata.org Global data, explained
• gapminder.org Charts with an interesting angle
• Nextstrain The family tree of viruses, updating itself
• informationisbeautiful.net The internet's queen of beautiful data
• neal.fun Addictive visual experiments
• radio.garden Spin the globe and listen to the radio from there
• Chronas A world map with a timeline: move the year and watch
• d3js.org The D3 gallery: the code behind so many charts
• tradingview.com The queen of financial indicators

Festivals that inspire

• Outlier Where data stories find their best stage
• DataFest Tbilisi The festival that celebrates the cultural power of data
• eyeo Festival The living archive of the digital creativity that marked an era