DaedalMapFour parts of a disaster record
Events
Individual records: storms, fires, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other hazard observations.
Affected places
Each event is connected to the counties, districts, or other maintained places it affected.
Summaries
Yearly and rolling windows turn event history into comparable place-level baselines.
Event links
Strong source-backed chains connect events across hazards.
Where events happened
A point on a map is rarely enough. A flood report may matter by county, a fire may matter by perimeter, a hurricane may matter by track, and a tsunami may matter through runups along a coast. DaedalMap records the relationship between the event and the places it affected instead of forcing every hazard into one geometry shape.
Most public summaries use county-equivalent areas as the first common comparison layer. Larger state and country views roll up from that same base, so zooming out does not quietly switch to a different method.
Comparing places over time
The summary layer answers place-first questions: how many events happened here, how much area was affected, how severe was the history, and how the last decade compares with a longer baseline.
Scores stay separate from observed history. A historical flood baseline, an earthquake score, and a wildfire exposure summary can all use the same place layer while keeping their hazard-specific meaning visible.
Source-backed event links
Event links are narrower than summaries. A link means one event plausibly triggered or directly generated another event, backed by source evidence or a clear hazard rule. Nearby events in the same week are not automatically treated as a chain.
Published link families include earthquake to tsunami, hurricane to flood, hurricane to tornado, volcano to earthquake, volcano to tsunami, and wildfire to flood. The shared graph favors precision over coverage, so weaker possibilities remain outside published links.
Research use
The disaster packs give researchers a bounded, source-backed record for event questions, place-level history, and selected causal chains. The geography work is already done: records carry stable place ids, summaries follow the affected places, and the public method separates observed history from interpretation.
- Event history: inspect the records behind a hazard pack.
- Place baselines: compare counties, regions, or countries across yearly and rolling windows.
- Source trail: inspect where the records came from and which method connected them to places.
- Disaster chains: follow high-confidence event links where the relationship is strong enough to publish.