Physical & climate risk • Global
Global Physical Risk
One of three linked altitudes: global hazard · Finnish mining · one mine's water
The standing physical hazard under a supply base. Four independent layers, each from a different authority: where river and coastal flooding recurs, where it is raining now, where satellites caught flooding in the last few days, and live global seismicity. All four are free, openly-licensed, and pulled straight into the map in the browser, so the surface stays live with no pipeline behind it. None of it forecasts the next earthquake or flood; what observed evidence like this does, on a named plant, port or supplier, is verify within hours whether the place is under water or off-line, the question a transaction-risk or insurance review has to answer and usually takes on the counterparty's word. The global view is the context; the asset-level check, scoped to a counterparty and seen through cloud by radar, is the layer behind it.
Sources: USGS (seismicity, public domain), NASA SEDAC (flood hazard), NASA GPM IMERG (precipitation) and NASA MODIS NRT Flood via GIBS. The rest of the live layer sits on the data index.
Flood hazard is a static global baseline (NASA SEDAC, 1985–2003 frequency): the deeper the blue, the more often a cell has flooded. Rain is NASA GPM IMERG satellite precipitation from about a day ago, green through red by intensity, transparent where dry. Observed flood is NASA MODIS detection from the last three days (2026-06-25); it is full-coverage and regional, so it stays hidden at world view and appears as you zoom into an area, where grey is cloud or no satellite pass. Earthquakes are the USGS M4.5+ feed for the last 30 days; click one for detail.
What you are looking at
Four independent layers, each from a different authority, each measuring a different thing. None is a forecast or a probability for one site; together they are a first cut of physical due diligence on a fixed location, a plant, a port, a supplier.
Flood hazard, the blue baseline. NASA SEDAC's record of how often each cell flooded between 1985 and 2003. It is a climatology, not an event: the deeper the blue, the more often a place floods. Read it as the standing exposure of a site before defences, drainage, or any single year. The big river systems and deltas, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Mississippi, light up because that is where water concentrates.
Rain, the live bands. NASA's GPM IMERG satellite precipitation, showing where it is actually raining now, within about a day, green through red as the rate climbs. This is the driver: heavy rain upstream is what turns a blue hazard zone into the cyan observed flood a day or two later. Watch the tropical band and the storm swirls.
Observed flood, zoom in. NASA's MODIS satellites composited over three days, showing where they actually caught standing water this week, not what floods on average. It is full-resolution and patchy, so it stays hidden until you zoom into a region. Cyan is water the satellite saw; grey is where cloud or no overpass left a gap. In a monsoon, when flooding is worst, cloud is thickest, so the optical view has the most holes exactly when you most want it. That gap is why serious verification uses radar.
Earthquakes, the dots. The USGS live feed of every magnitude 4.5 and above in the last 30 days, sized by magnitude and coloured grey through amber to red. They trace the plate boundaries, the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Himalayan front, the Mediterranean. Unlike flood, this is not exposure you can site around; it is where the ground itself is the risk.
Where the hazards land
Set the layers against the map of where things are actually made, and the overlaps are uncomfortable. The recurring-flood belt, the Bay of Bengal, the Mekong, the Pearl River delta, sits on the same ground that China-plus-one is moving production onto, so the supply-chain hedge quietly inherits a monsoon-season exposure most site selections never priced. The Pacific Ring of Fire runs straight through the semiconductor core, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, stacking one hazard class over a chokepoint of global electronics.
None of this is forecastable, and none of it has to be. The fault and the monsoon are fixed; the day they strike is not the question a review can answer. Whether a specific facility is in the water this week is. Optical satellites and desk diligence both go blind to cloud exactly when flooding peaks, which is why the credible answer on a named asset comes from cloud-penetrating radar rather than the public layers above. The overlaps are the context; the check on a single counterparty is what a transaction-risk or insurance file actually buys.
The national deep layer: Finland
The global layers above are the context. The answer a transaction or insurance file needs is national and asset-level, and that is where a country's own open data goes deeper than any global feed. Finland is the worked example. The Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) publishes modelled flood inundation, by return period for river and sea, and the footprints of floods that were actually observed and surveyed, both as open map services pulled straight into the map here. Turn on the Finland layers and zoom in: the flood zones thread along the rivers and the coast, the same strips that a site selection on cheap riverside land tends to leave out of the price.
The amber points are Finland's mines, and on this map they are assets to read against the hazard: which of them sit in a flood zone, which on the coast. What a mine puts into the water, and how you separate the mine's load from the natural background, is a different question on its own surface, the mine-water signal, read from SYKE's open chemistry; the mining opportunity-and-risk hub sets those mines in their sector context. Here the question is the one this map asks everywhere: what hazard is the asset exposed to.
Finland sources: SYKE open web services (flood maps, CC BY 4.0) and GTK (mineral deposits). Mine points are an A1AYN compilation at site level.