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| title: "Thermal Escalation" |
| description: "FIRMS/VIIRS thermal anomaly clusters with baseline comparison, persistence, and conflict-adjacency flags for spotting abnormal heat signatures." |
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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** — currently conflict-adjacent, persistent, or high-FRP activity. |
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| ## What the panel shows |
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| A card list of thermal clusters with: |
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| - **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`. |
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| A summary bar across the top counts: total clusters, elevated, spike, persistent, conflict-adjacent, and high-relevance. |
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| **Row interactions**: |
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| - Click a cluster card to jump the map to that cluster's coordinates. |
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| Panel id is `thermal-escalation`; canonical component is `src/components/ThermalEscalationPanel.ts`. |
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| ## How you reach it |
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| - **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 |
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| Per the in-panel info tooltip, Thermal Escalation is seeded from: |
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| - **FIRMS / VIIRS** — NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite thermal anomaly feeds. |
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| 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 |
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| 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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| ## Methodology |
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| 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. |
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| See [Thermal Escalation Methodology](/methodology/thermal-escalation) for thresholds, status rules, confidence bands, and the current conflict-region allowlist. |
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| ## Tier & gating |
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| Thermal Escalation is **free**. No `premium` flag in `src/config/panels.ts`; the RPC is public. |
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| ## API reference |
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| - [Thermal service](/api/ThermalService.openapi.yaml) — `list-thermal-escalations`. |
| - Related: [Natural Disasters / Wildfires](/natural-disasters) for the raw-detection map layer that feeds this clustering. |
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