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Weather satellites detect heat. Every day they log thousands of hot spots worldwide — most of them farmers burning stubble, flares at refineries, and ordinary wildfires. Buried in that noise are the ones that matter: a burning depot, a struck refinery, a fire that should not be there. Thermal Escalation is the filter. It asks one question about every heat detection: is this unusual for this place?How it decides something is unusual
Individual satellite pixels are first grouped into clusters — nearby detections seen around the same time are almost certainly one event, not fifteen. Each cluster is then compared against what that same patch of ground normally looks like, using the previous seven days as the yardstick. A fire in a place that burns every week is normal. The same fire where nothing has burned in a month is not. That comparison is the entire idea. Each cluster comes out with a status:
Two more fields shape what reaches the top of the panel. Relevance is raised
when a cluster is both unusual and in a region with active conflict — the
combination that most often means infrastructure rather than agriculture.
Confidence reports how much evidence stands behind the call: how many
detections, how many separate satellites saw it, and how much baseline history
exists to compare against.
Terminology. FRP (fire radiative power) is the measured energy output of a
detection — roughly, how intensely it is burning, as opposed to how many pixels
lit up. Both are used, because a small very hot event and a large smouldering one
are different situations.
thermal-escalation panel. The implementation lives in scripts/lib/thermal-escalation.mjs.
Clustering
Detections are sorted by observation time and grouped by region label. A detection joins the nearest existing cluster in the same region when it falls within20km; otherwise it starts a new cluster. Cluster centroids are updated incrementally as detections are added.
Each cluster is assigned to a 0.5-degree baseline cell by rounding latitude and longitude to the nearest 0.5 degrees.
Baseline and Persistence
The scorer keeps 30 days of cell history and uses the last 7 days as the comparison baseline. For each cluster it computes:
Prior observations within 18 hours extend persistence. The panel display window is 24 hours.
Status Rules
Context and Relevance
Conflict adjacency is determined from the cluster’s region label, not from a live distance join against conflict events. The current conflict-region allowlist is: Ukraine, Russia, Israel/Gaza, Syria, Iran, Taiwan, North Korea, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Iraq, and Pakistan. Strategic relevance is assigned as:
The current implementation does not perform infrastructure-proximity matching.
nearbyAssets is emitted as an empty array until an asset matcher is wired into the seeder.
Confidence
Rows are sorted by relevance, then status severity, total FRP, and observation count.