What's on the globe

23 layers. 40-odd data sources. One place.

Normally you'd need a flight tracker, a ship tracker, a weather app, a surf app, a satellite site and a council website or two. Here it's all one switch away, and it all runs on the same clock, so you can watch a storm roll in, rewind it and see the lightning again.

Space and sky

SatellitesEVERY 2 H

All 16,792 active payloads, from the ISS to every Starlink, propagated on the GPU every frame. Tap one to follow it round the planet.

CelesTrak · US Space Force 18 SDS

Space debrisEVERY 2 H

10,239 pieces of debris and 2,167 spent rocket bodies, each drawn in its own style.

CelesTrak

Aurora5 MIN

The OVATION forecast as a glow on the night side, with the live Kp index.

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center

Stars and constellationsSTATIC

8,920 stars down to magnitude 6.5, precessed to the date, and all 88 constellations plus the famous asterisms.

HYG v4.4 · d3-celestial · Astronomy Engine

Earth in motion

Earthquakes1 MIN

The last 24 hours, sized by magnitude. New ones pulse as they arrive.

USGS

Lightning1 MIN

Every flash blooms white-blue then fades. The Americas from GOES, Europe and Africa from Meteosat's new Lightning Imager.

NOAA GOES GLM · EUMETSAT MTG LI

Satellite clouds10 MIN

The hourly infrared mosaic from the GOES, Meteosat and Himawari weather satellites. Works the same at night as by day.

NOAA/NESDIS GMGSI

WildfiresEVERY 2 H

Every hotspot the VIIRS instruments pick up from orbit, with 48 hours of history for rewind.

NASA FIRMS VIIRS

Weather and sea

Weather, 18 mapsEVERY GFS RUN

Wind, temperature, rain and snow, gusts, pressure with isobars, CAPE, humidity, feels-like, snow depth, freezing level and more. 41 frames out to 5 days, with up to 65,536 wind particles flowing over the top.

NOAA GFS and GFS-Wave

Waves, swell and currentsHOURLY

Two swell trains, wind sea and sea temperature, plus ocean currents drawn as streaks at 0.25°.

NOAA GFS-Wave · NOAA Global RTOFS

Surf, 36 Cornish spots4× DAILY

Star ratings, tide, a five-day outlook, the nearest live wave buoy and bathing-water warnings for every spot.

Met Office NWS model via Copernicus Marine · CCO buoys · EA

Air quality and UV10–60 MIN

Official UK stations with the Daily Air Quality Index and a 5-day forecast, 10,860 world stations, citizen sensors, and PM2.5, dust, smoke and UV maps.

Defra UK-AIR · OpenAQ · Sensor.Community · CAMS · UKHSA

Things that move

Aircraft10 S

Every plane the network can hear, turned to its track and coloured by height. Tap one for its route, its progress and the line it has flown. Fed in part by our own ADS-B radio receiver.

Own 1090 MHz receiver · adsb.lol (ODbL) · VRS standing-data

Buses and trains30 S

Every bus in England that's reported in, plus every Underground, Overground, DLR, Elizabeth line and tram train in London, gliding between real reports.

DfT Bus Open Data · TfL Unified API

Roads5 MIN

Closures and disruptions on England's motorways and major A-roads, and across London.

National Highways · TfL

Ships1 MIN

Live AIS for Finnish and northern Baltic waters, ships turned to their heading and coloured by type.

Fintraffic Digitraffic (CC BY 4.0)

Airspace restrictionsCURATED

33 conflict-zone warnings and bans, shaded on the map.

EASA · FAA · VATSpy

Britain, up close

Water15 MIN

Every river coloured by its gauge, from low to very high. Flood warnings, tide and surge at 39 gauges, and bathing-water quality.

Environment Agency · OS Open Rivers · TICON-3

CitiesDAILY / WEEKLY

Population to census detail, modelled road and rail noise, street crime, and every public EV charger worldwide.

ONS · GHS-POP · Defra · data.police.uk · Open Charge Map

British Isles in 19 m detail2025 Q3

Our own bake of the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mosaic: 14,214 tiles for close-ups of home, on top of 9.5 m cloudless imagery for the world.

Copernicus Sentinel-2 · EOX

Reference

202,357 place namesSTATIC

From countries down to villages over 14 zoom levels, thinned so two names never overlap.

Natural Earth · GeoNames · OS Open Names

Borders, time zones, gridSTATIC

81,850 points of coast and border, live clocks per time zone, and a lat-long grid with the tropics in gold.

Natural Earth 1:50m · timezone-boundary-builder

Day and night EarthMONTHLY

Twelve monthly Blue Marble textures at up to 8192 × 4096, so the snow line moves with the seasons, and NASA's Black Marble city lights after dark.

NASA Blue Marble NG · NASA Black Marble

Time travelRewind 24 hours, or fast-forward up to 5 days of forecast, at up to an hour a second.

What's above me?Everything over your head right now, tonight's sky and visible ISS passes. Your location never leaves the device.

Sky from hereLong-press anywhere to stand on the ground and look up, with a compass and the constellations.

Five activitiesSurf, sail and kite, snow, gliding and stargazing presets, each with a 5-day card, a confidence rating and what to wear.

Hear the planetQuakes ring as bells, lightning crackles, the aurora hums. All synthesised live, with captions.

Every feature by keyboardTested end to end, plus reduced motion, screen-reader captions and a phone layout.

Our own ears on the sky

We don't just borrow the planes. We listen for them.

Plenty of map sites just pull someone else's feed. Living Earth has its own antenna. A software-defined radio tuned to 1090 MHz sits on the same Raspberry Pi 5 that runs the rest of the planet, decoding the ADS-B messages every passing aircraft broadcasts: position, height, speed, callsign. Those messages go straight into the adsb.lol community network, and feeding the network is what opens up its worldwide feed to us. Every plane on the globe is a two-way deal.

29.0Mmessages decoded since it switched on, 23 Oct 2026

1.34Maircraft positions worked out

12,157aircraft tracks heard

~3,000messages a minute, even at midnight

readsb stats on the Pi, 23 Oct 20:20 UTC to 26 Oct 23:25 UTC · RTL-SDR · readsb 3.14

Two ways to run it

Leave it alone and it puts on a show.

Both screenshots were taken from the live site on 26 October 2026. No mock-ups, no staged data.

Demo mode

Twenty seconds idle, and it starts hunting.

Walk away and the globe locks on to things by itself: a satellite with its NORAD number, height and speed, the latest quake, the busiest storm, the hottest and coldest places in view. Touch anything and it hands straight back.

And it's not a painted backdrop. The Sun and the Moon sit exactly where they really are at that moment, worked out from Meeus's lunar theory, and the Moon wears NASA's real surface map, turned the way it really faces us.

Target locks with real orbital data, 10 seconds each
Weather boxes with what to wear, sunrise and sunset
Perfect for a lobby screen, a classroom or a shop window

Surf shop screen

A free forecast board for any surf shop.

One link turns a TV into a forecast board. It laps through the shop's own breaks, 12 seconds each, then shows the best of Cornwall right now. The wave is drawn against a 1.71 m surfer, so "6–8 ft" actually means something.

Wave height in feet and in plain words: knee, waist, head high, overhead
Tide, wind and the nearest live wave buoy
Five-day outlook, refreshed every 30 minutes

The 5-day forecast

Tap anywhere on Earth. Get the next five days.

Switch the weather on, tap the ground, and a forecast card opens for exactly that spot: every three hours for five days, grouped by local day. Then lay any of 18 forecast maps over the whole planet and scrub through time to watch it happen.

Living Earth's 5-day forecast card for a spot in Cornwall, with three-hourly rows of temperature, wind, gusts, rain and cloud, a confidence rating for each day and a what-to-wear line — FORECAST CARD · 50.45°N 4.90°W, CORNWALL · LIVE SITE · 26 OCT 2026

Every 3 hours, for 5 days. Sky, temperature and feels-like, wind and gusts with direction, rain, cloud cover, and waves with their period.
A confidence rating for each day. We compare the latest run with the runs from 6, 12 and 18 hours before. When the models keep changing their minds, the card says so.
What to wear. A plain answer, worked out from the numbers. No guessing.
Five activity modes. Surf, sail and kite, snow, gliding and stargazing each swap in the rows that matter, from swell periods to cloud base to sky darkness.

18 forecast maps, all free

WindGustsTemperatureFeels likeRain + snowCloudsPressure + isobarsCAPEHumiditySnow depthFreezing levelBoundary layerWavesSwellSecond swellWind seaSea tempCurrents

FeatureLiving EarthWeatherPro

Live lightning mapFreePremium

IsobarsFreePremium

Wind animation over the globeFree, 65,536 particlesNot listed

Swell, currents, CAPE, snow depthFreeNot listed

Day-by-day confidenceFreeNot listed

Forecast length5 days, 3-hourly14 days hourly (Premium)

Price£0£8.99 a year

Forecast data: NOAA GFS 0.5°, refreshed with every model run. WeatherPro features from its UK App Store listing, 26 Oct 2026.

The comparison

What the specialists charge for a slice of it.

We priced the apps people actually use for each kind of data, from their own pricing pages and the UK App Store on 26 October 2026. Each one is very good at its one thing. None of them does the rest.

Living Earth £0

Every layer, every feature, no account, nothing to install. Open a link and it's running.

The specialist stack ~£146 a year

FlightRadar24 Gold£33.99

Surfline Premium£34.99*

MarineTraffic Mobile Pro£29.99*

Windy Premium£22.99

Ventusky Premium£14.99

WeatherPro Premium£8.99

*Billing period not stated on the UK listing. Even with all six you still get no UK rivers, floods, buses, tube or EV chargers.

What you get	Living Earth	FlightRadar24	WeatherPro	Windy	MarineTraffic	Surfline	Google Earth
Live aircraft	FREE	FREE + PAID	—	—	—	—	—
Satellites and debris	FREE	—	—	—	—	—	—
Earthquakes	FREE	—	—	—	—	—	—
Lightning	FREE	—	PAID	LISTED	—	—	—
Weather maps and wind	FREE	CLOUD: GOLD	FREE + PAID	FREE + PAID	FREE + PAID	WIND	—
Ocean currents	FREE	—	—	LISTED	—	—	—
Surf forecast	FREE · CORNWALL	—	—	WAVES	—	FREE + PAID	—
Ships	FREE · BALTIC	—	—	—	FREE + PAID	—	—
Air quality	FREE	—	—	LISTED	—	—	—
UK rivers and floods	FREE	—	—	—	—	—	—
Buses, tube and trams	FREE	—	—	—	—	—	—
3D globe	FREE	3 FREE SESSIONS	—	—	—	—	FREE
Price a year	£0	£0–£33.99	£0–£8.99	£0–£22.99	£0–£29.99*	£0–£34.99*	£0 · Pro $900/user

FREE free to everyone FREE + PAID basics free, extras paid PAID paid tier only LISTED on its feature list, tier not stated — not on its own feature or pricing pages

Under the hood

No game engine. No globe library. Written from the metal up.

We're boiling the ocean here, on purpose. Living Earth is hand-written TypeScript and WebGPU with exactly two runtime dependencies. Here's what it takes to put 29,000 satellites, 10,000 planes and a live weather model on a phone at close to 60 frames a second.

Orbital mechanics on the GPU

The full SGP4/SDP4 model for every object, every frame

The standard satellite model, deep-space resonance terms and all, ported line for line to a compute shader. WGSL has no 64-bit floats, so we emulate them: each hot term is two 32-bit floats (about 48 bits), with our own branch-free sine, cosine and arctangent. One dispatch a frame, no allocation.

Error vs the f64 reference, 29,093 objects	Median	p99	Worst	Worst at +7 days
Emulated double (df64)	2 m	20 m	104 m	132 m
Plain f32	22 m	499 m	3.1 km	4.5 km

A satellite moves 7.6 km every second. A 2 m median error is the width of a car.

Frame rate

59.9fps

Median with one million moving points at 3828 × 1923, and not one of 3,600 frames dropped. The GPU pass took 2.88 ms of the 16.7 ms budget.

GPU median2.88 ms

GPU p954.78 ms

Frame budget16.7 ms

Desktop, NVIDIA Ampere

On a phone

58.8fps

On an iPhone 16 Pro Max at full resolution (1320 × 2268), 1 dropped frame in 3,240. A repeat run matched.

iPhone 16 Pro Max · first-release load of 85,000 points

Tap to pick

29ms

Median time to work out what you tapped on a phone, among a million points. Every shader writes its object's id to a hidden buffer in the same pass, and we read back a tiny square under your finger without ever stalling a frame. 200 taps out of 200 found their object.

iPhone · p95 30 ms · max 40 ms

Weather particles

65,536

Wind, current and wave particles, each with a 24-point trail, advected on the GPU and killed at the coastline by a mask. The count scales to your screen, one per 90 square pixels.

One compute invocation per particle, branch-free

Wire formats

21 custom file formats, byte-for-byte lean

Every feed is turned into a purpose-built binary format before it leaves the ingest host. Files are named by their SHA-256, so nothing is ever sent twice.

LEACaircraft16 B each

LELTlightning14 B a flash

LESHships24 B each

LEEQearthquakes26 B + text

LESBstars6 B each

LEAV 2buses, columnar varint54% smaller

Decoders from scratch

GRIB2, JPEG 2000 and HDF5, in plain TypeScript

Weather models arrive as GRIB, satellite imagery as JPEG 2000 and HDF5. Instead of shipping native libraries, we wrote the decoders. Our GRIB2 decoder matches ECMWF's ecCodes on every point to within 0.000015.

Decoder	Lines
HDF5	987
JPEG 2000	701
GRIB2	403
GRIB1	325

The pipeline

A Raspberry Pi runs the whole planet

Sources40-odd feedsNOAA, USGS, EUMETSAT, CelesTrak, the Environment Agency, TfL, DfT and the rest

IngestRaspberry Pi 521 systemd jobs, from every minute to weekly, plus its own ADS-B radio receiver

StoreCloudflare R2~30,000 uploads a day, inside the free 1M a month

ServePages + WorkersEdge functions and cron jobs for quakes and aurora, on the free plan

DrawYour GPUWebGPU compute and 40 hand-written shader files, right in your browser

The craft, in numbers

23live data layers on one globe

965commits

236,911lines of TypeScript

5,978lines of WGSL shader code

7,814unit tests

248end-to-end browser tests on a real GPU

2runtime dependencies. That's it.

£0a month to host, by design

COMING SOON

Ask the Earth.

Every number on this globe, live and searchable by just asking. Ask the Earth puts a large language model on top of every feed we ingest, so you can talk to the planet in plain English and watch the globe answer: it flies the camera, switches on the right layers, rewinds the clock and tells you what it found, with the source and the time for every figure.

01

It reads the live data, not the internet. The model gets tools for every layer (aircraft, quakes, lightning, surf, rivers, buses and the rest) and pulls the actual records from our own feeds.

02

It drives the globe. Answers come with actions: fly here, follow that plane, turn on currents, rewind six hours. You see the answer as well as read it.

03

Every figure is cited. Each number carries its source and timestamp. If the data isn't there, it says so instead of making something up.

04

It joins the dots. The interesting questions cross layers: rain upstream and a river already high, a good swell and a pollution warning, a clear sky and an ISS pass.

ASK THE EARTHEXAMPLE CONVERSATION

Where's the best surf in Cornwall at first light tomorrow, and is the water clean?

Watergate Bay looks best: 6–8 ft on an 11-second west-north-west swell, rated 5 stars, with low tide at 11:47. The Perranporth buoy is reading 2.3 m right now, so the swell is arriving as forecast. No pollution warnings on that stretch today. Fistral is close behind at 5–7 ft.

FLY TO NEWQUAYSURF LAYER ONOPEN WATERGATE CARD

And what's that plane circling over Newquay?

I'll lock on to it and show you its track. If it's in range of our receiver, you're seeing it from our own antenna.

AIRCRAFT LAYER ONFOLLOWSHOW FLOWN TRACK

AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE PLANNED FEATURE. THE SURF FIGURES ARE THE REAL FORECAST FOR 27 OCT 2026.

Rivers + rainAre any rivers in Yorkshire rising, and is more rain coming?Reads 3,000-odd river gauges and flood warnings, then the next 48 hours of rain upstream.

Space + skyWhen can I next see the ISS from Bristol, and will it be cloudy?Works out the passes, then checks the cloud forecast for each one and picks the best.

RewindReplay last night's storm over the Channel. How many strikes hit land?Rewinds the clock, plays the lightning back and counts the flashes over the coast.

EarthquakesWhich earthquakes today were strong enough to be felt in a city?Crosses the quake feed with population, so the answer is about people, not just magnitudes.

TravelIs my 08:10 bus in Manchester actually running, and are the roads clear?Finds the live bus, then checks the roadworks and incidents on its route.

AirIs it a good day for a run in London, or is the air bad?Reads the official stations, the citizen sensors and the UV forecast, and gives a straight yes or no.

Wildfires + windWhere's the smoke from today's fires heading?Matches the fire hotspots with the wind and smoke forecasts, and shows the plume on the globe.

PlanesFollow the next transatlantic flight leaving Heathrow.Picks it out of 10,000 aircraft, locks the camera on and narrates the route.

Fortitude Omnis Group

Your data. On a living globe.

Living Earth is a tech showcase. It's what happens when we point our engine at the whole planet's open data and don't stop. Imagine it pointed at your data instead: your sensors, your sites, your customers, your readings, live on a 3D globe in any modern browser, with no plug-ins, no game engine and no per-seat licence.

Talk to us fortitude-omnis.group Or see it running right now: earth.fortitude-omnis.group

The whole planet, live, in one browser tab.