Acknowledgements
Yearth owns almost nothing. Every dot, every cloud and every orbit on this globe exists because scientists, engineers, public agencies, open-source developers and thousands of volunteers chose to share their work with the world. This page is our thank-you note to them.
The inspiration
earth.nullschool.net - Cameron Beccario
The beautiful, animated weather globe that made us want to build this. Yearth is not affiliated with nullschool and uses none of its code or data, but it would not exist without the idea. nullschool in turn credits the HINT.FM wind map as its inspiration. Ideas travel, like the wind.
Aircraft
The OpenSky Network
A non-profit association based in Switzerland, started as a research project by universities and government bodies to improve the safety and efficiency of the airspace. OpenSky collects ADS-B signals through a worldwide network of receivers and gives the data away free for research and non-commercial use. Our global picture of aircraft comes from OpenSky's live API.
Used under the OpenSky terms of use for non-commercial purposes. Please cite: Matthias Schäfer, Martin Strohmeier, Vincent Lenders, Ivan Martinovic and Matthias Wilhelm, "Bringing Up OpenSky: A Large-scale ADS-B Sensor Network for Research", IPSN 2014. opensky-network.org
adsb.fi
A community-driven flight tracker with feeders all over the world that keeps air-traffic data open and unfiltered. Its free API gives Yearth its real-time aircraft: positions every few seconds around our focus cities, and for any aircraft you click.
Flight data from adsb.fi, used for personal, non-commercial purposes under its open-data terms.
adsb.lol
A completely open-source, community-run flight tracker that publishes its data under an open licence. Its API answers our tail-number, flight-number and hex-code searches, and tells us each aircraft's registration and type.
Flight data from adsb.lol, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
airplanes.live
Another community network sharing unfiltered flight data. The "more" link on each aircraft opens its tracker, where you can see full flight histories.
Every volunteer with an antenna
Most flight-tracking data in the world comes from ordinary people who put a small radio receiver on a rooftop, a balcony or a window sill and share what it hears, for free. Thank you. If you would like to join them, a cheap software-defined radio and a Raspberry Pi is all it takes.
Ships
aisstream.io
A free, real-time stream of AIS ship messages from around the world, delivered over a single WebSocket. Every ship position, name and IMO number on Yearth arrives through aisstream.io.
The AIS system and the people who receive it
The Automatic Identification System was created for safety at sea: international rules require larger ships and all passenger ships to broadcast who and where they are, so they can avoid each other. Coastal stations, port authorities and volunteers who receive these signals make public ship tracking possible. The message formats follow the ITU-R M.1371 standard.
Satellites
CelesTrak - Dr T.S. Kelso
For decades Dr Kelso has published orbit data for every tracked satellite, free, along with clear explanations and tools that taught a generation how orbits work. Our satellite catalogue is downloaded from CelesTrak in the modern OMM (JSON) format, at most once every few hours as CelesTrak asks.
The underlying orbit data is produced by the U.S. Space Force and shared through Space-Track.org. celestrak.org
satellite.js and the SGP4 model
satellite.js, started by Shashwat Kandadai and improved by many contributors, runs the SGP4 orbit model inside your browser. That is how over ten thousand satellites move smoothly on your screen without any live feed. SGP4 itself comes from decades of work by the U.S. space surveillance community, and the modern public version owes much to David Vallado and his co-authors.
satellite.js - MIT License. github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js
N2YO
Each satellite's "more" link opens its page on N2YO, a long-running satellite tracking site.
Weather and air
NOAA - Global Forecast System (GFS)
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Prediction run the GFS weather model on supercomputers four times a day and publish the results for anyone to use. Our rain and snow layer is the GFS precipitation rate.
U.S. Government work, public domain. NOAA NCEP GFS
WAVEWATCH III
The WAVEWATCH III ocean wave model was developed at NOAA/NCEP. The global run we use is operated by the University of Hawaii in collaboration with NOAA/NCEP and the National Weather Service in Honolulu, driven by GFS winds. It gives us the significant wave height layer.
PacIOOS - Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System
PacIOOS hosts the GFS and WAVEWATCH III data we read, and serves them through ERDDAP so a small project can download exactly the slice it needs. PacIOOS is funded through NOAA as part of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and is coordinated by the University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).
ERDDAP - NOAA NMFS SWFSC Environmental Research Division
ERDDAP, created by Bob Simons at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center, is the free data server that makes enormous scientific datasets easy to use. Hundreds of organisations run it.
Open-Meteo
A free, open-source weather API started by Patrick Zippenfenig. It combines forecasts from national weather services (such as NOAA, DWD, ECMWF, Météo-France and JMA) into one simple service. Our cloud cover layer comes from Open-Meteo's forecast API, and our PM2.5 layer from its air-quality API.
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Free for non-commercial use.
Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)
The PM2.5 air-pollution forecast comes from CAMS, run by ECMWF on behalf of the European Union's Copernicus programme, delivered to us through Open-Meteo.
Contains modified Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service information. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use of this information.
The Earth itself
NASA Earth imagery
The daytime Earth is derived from NASA's Blue Marble imagery and the night side from NASA's images of city lights at night - two of the most beautiful public-domain pictures ever made. We use the copies packaged with the three-globe examples by Vasco Asturiano, along with its star-field background.
NASA imagery is in the public domain. visibleearth.nasa.gov
Hosting
Netlify and Oracle Cloud
The website is served by Netlify's free plan, and the live data server runs on an Oracle Cloud Always Free virtual machine. The free web address and its HTTPS certificate come from DuckDNS, Caddy and Let's Encrypt.
Open-source software
In your browser
- three.js - Ricardo Cabello (mrdoob) and contributors - 3D graphics on the web. MIT License.
- globe.gl and three-globe - Vasco Asturiano - the globe and its camera controls. MIT License.
- satellite.js - Shashwat Kandadai and contributors - SGP4 orbit calculations. MIT License.
On our server
- Node.js - the OpenJS Foundation and contributors - runs the server.
- Express - TJ Holowaychuk and the Express team - the web server. MIT License.
- ws - Einar Otto Stangvik and contributors - the live connections to aisstream.io and to your browser. MIT License.
- compression - the Express team - makes downloads smaller. MIT License.
- dotenv - reads the settings file. BSD-2-Clause License.
- esbuild - Evan Wallace - bundles the browser code. MIT License.
The builders
The human - idea, direction and stubbornness
Claude, by Anthropic - code, research and patience
Yearth was designed and written in conversation between a curious human and an AI. See the About page for the story.
If we missed you
If your work appears on Yearth and we have not credited it properly, we are sorry - please tell us and we will fix it straight away. If you run one of the services above and would like us to change how we use it, we will listen.