Global Sitrep – Support
Global Sitrep is a live global risk dashboard: earthquakes, disasters, armed conflict, disease outbreaks, displacement, climate anomalies, markets, shipping chokepoints and news, on one screen. It has no account and no server of its own.
Getting started
- The app opens on the map. Pins are live events; the country shading is a risk score, not an event count. Tap a pin or a country for detail.
- The dashboard is yours to arrange. Add, remove, reorder and resize panels from the arrange page. Your layout is saved.
- The time window at the top changes what “live” means. Note that standing conflict zones and the historical conflict record deliberately ignore it, because a four-year war produces no events in a 24-hour window.
- Alerts collects what the app thinks is worth your attention right now.
Common questions
Do I need an account, or to pay for anything? No. There is no account, no sign-in, and no paywall. Every panel, layer and source is included. There is an optional tip jar that unlocks nothing.
Do I need an API key? No. Ten of the seventeen sources need nothing at all. Five (NASA FIRMS, ACLED, ReliefWeb, Windy.com and the OpenSky Network) ask you to register with them directly, and Settings has a page explaining each with a signup link. The app works fine without them; those specific layers just stay empty and say so.
Why does a source say “Needs a key” or “Failed”? Settings lists every source with its state, and the reason if it failed. A source that returns nothing will tell you it returned nothing, rather than looking the same as one that is broken. If something reads “Failed”, it is usually the provider being temporarily unavailable.
Why is a conflict event in an odd place, or obviously not conflict? Some of the conflict wire comes from GDELT, which codes events automatically from news text. That is fast but it makes mistakes, particularly with figures of speech. The app restricts these to twenty active conflict countries for exactly this reason. Verified historical conflict records come from UCDP instead, and death tolls from the Humanitarian Data Exchange.
Why do the numbers differ between two panels? Usually because they are counting different things on purpose: a live window versus a standing record, or an exact severity band versus everything above it. Tap a panel for its detail view, which states what it is measuring.
Some data looks out of date. Some of it is, legitimately. Shipping transit volumes land about two weeks in arrears, conflict records lag by around a month, and displacement figures are annual. The app shows the date the data is actually for rather than the time it fetched it.
Does it work offline? It opens and shows you the last data it had, which is cached on your device. New data needs a connection.
Live TV does not start playing. It does not play here at all. The channel list is a directory: pick a channel and it opens that broadcaster’s own channel in YouTube, where it plays under their terms rather than inside Global Sitrep. Nothing opens until you choose one.
How do I use less cellular data? Fetches are throttled by how often each source actually publishes, so the app does not poll needlessly. Watching a channel spends data in YouTube rather than here.
The flights layer says “Zoom in to see flights”. OpenSky charges by the area you ask for, against a daily allowance attached to your account, so the app refuses to request a region larger than a continent rather than spending your allowance on a view where the aircraft would be dots. Zoom in and it loads. The chip tells you what it is doing at each step, including counting down when it is waiting.
Why does it say an aircraft is “likely military”? That is inferred from the transponder’s registration block and its callsign, both of which are public and neither of which is proof. The app says which of the two matched so you can judge it yourself. It will occasionally be wrong in both directions, which is why it says “likely” and never names a mission.
An aircraft shows no type or photograph. Aircraft types come from a snapshot of OpenSky’s aircraft database, which they no longer update. Anything registered since the snapshot is missing, and military and state aircraft are frequently withheld from it altogether. The app tells you which of those it is rather than leaving the space blank.
Not for operational use
Global Sitrep aggregates public data for general awareness. Do not rely on it for emergency response, travel safety, or any decision where being wrong matters.
Reporting a problem
Email drdjcannon@gmail.com. Useful things to include: what you were looking at, which source or panel, what you expected, and a screenshot. If it is a wrong figure, the source name and the number you saw are the two most helpful details.