Thermal Escalation

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 — currently conflict-adjacent, persistent, or high-FRP activity.

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 whose region label is in the current conflict-region allowlist.
• High-relevance flag — conflict-adjacent clusters that are spike or persistent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Methodology

The current scorer clusters detections within 20km, compares each 0.5-degree cell against a 7-day local baseline, tracks 18-hour persistence, and retains 30 days of history for baseline continuity. Conflict adjacency is allowlist-based rather than infrastructure-proximity based; the current payload's nearbyAssets array is intentionally empty until an asset matcher is wired.

See Thermal Escalation Methodology for thresholds, status rules, confidence bands, and the current conflict-region allowlist.

Tier & gating

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

API reference

• Thermal service — list-thermal-escalations.
• Related: Natural Disasters / Wildfires for the raw-detection map layer that feeds this clustering.