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The Thermal Escalation panel turns raw thermal-satellite detections (hotspots) into clustered events and evaluates each cluster against its local baseline and context. It answers two questions: where is thermal activity abnormal, and which clusters are strategically relevant — adjacent to conflict, critical infrastructure, or other high-signal contexts.

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What the panel shows

A card list of thermal clusters with:
  • Status label per cluster: normal, elevated, spike, or persistent.
  • Baseline comparison — how the current detection density differs from the cluster’s baseline.
  • Persistence tracking — clusters that re-appear across successive windows are flagged persistent.
  • Conflict-adjacent flag — clusters near active conflict events.
  • High-relevance flag — clusters near critical infrastructure or other strategic context.
A summary bar across the top counts: total clusters, elevated, spike, persistent, conflict-adjacent, and high-relevance. Row interactions:
  • Click a cluster card to jump the map to that cluster’s coordinates.
Panel id is thermal-escalation; canonical component is src/components/ThermalEscalationPanel.ts.

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How you reach it

  • Cmd+K: type thermal or escalation.
  • Availability by variant: registered and enabled by default in the full/geopolitical variant only. Not present in the tech, finance, commodity, or happy variants. Source: FULL_PANELS in src/config/panels.ts.

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Data sources

Per the in-panel info tooltip, Thermal Escalation is seeded from:
  • FIRMS / VIIRS — NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite thermal anomaly feeds.
A single RPC backs the panel: GET /api/thermal/v1/list-thermal-escalations. The backend seeder clusters raw detections, compares against the baseline, applies persistence and adjacency logic, and writes the result at thermal:escalation:v1 in Redis.

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Refresh cadence

The seeder runs on a ~2-hour cron. The key is allowed up to 6 hours (maxStaleMin: 360) in api/health.js — 3× the nominal interval — before the health surface escalates. The longer grace window accommodates FIRMS refresh cycles and the clustering step’s runtime.

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Tier & gating

Thermal Escalation is free. No premium flag in src/config/panels.ts; the RPC is public.

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API reference