Earth Alerts

Earth Alerts is an application that provides real-time monitoring of various natural hazard events worldwide, including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and more.

It uses data from organizations like the National Weather Service and U.S. Geological Survey to keep users informed about natural phenomena as they occur globally.

The program packs a rugged interface that is a Settings window, but I found it easy to navigate nonetheless. To the left, you can access the type of hazard events you want to monitor, be it earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones or volcano eruptions.

The aforementioned events can be set for global monitoring or just for the United States, and you can choose solely the ones you want to receive notifications for. Provided that you have linked a primary location, you will be able to neatly view the hazard displayed on a map in real-time.

In theory, you can disable all U.S.-related notifications by clicking No on the prompt screen. However, I noticed that the application shuts down if you don’t add a primary location from the US. Adding the location is another hassle, as you need an API Key for the Google Maps Platform.

To provide the data, the program relies on reputable U.S.-based sources such as the National Weather Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Smithsonian Institution, and others. If you are monitoring for some specific events in other parts of the globe, the notifications may come later or not at all.

Once you added your location and configured the types of hazards to monitor, you can close the app, as this will send Earth Alerts to the System Tray. You don’t really need to interact with it other than change or add extra locations. The app triggers visual and audio alerts when critical events are taking place.