Methodology and sources

Mira Safe aggregates real-time risk signals for travellers. This page shows exactly where the data comes from, how it is processed, what is written by AI, and where this service stops. Every claim here is backed by the live data you see on the site.

Where the data comes from

59 sources are currently connected. This list is generated live from the same snapshot as the homepage — the timestamp is each source's latest signal.

Official and institutional sources

Academic sources

Weather (Mira in-house)

  • Mira WeatherAug 27, 2026, 4:21 PM

Press, radio and TV monitoring (Mira in-house)

  • GDELT ↗Aug 27, 2026, 4:03 PM
  • Mira Press WatchAug 27, 2026, 4:41 PM
  • Mira Radio WatchAug 27, 2026, 4:41 PM

Social networks (witness signals)

How a signal becomes an alert

  1. 1

    Ingestion: each source is polled at its own pace — every 2 minutes for earthquakes, up to a few hours for slow-moving feeds. Some sources push to us in real time.

  2. 2

    Cross-source matching: the same event reported by several sources is merged into one. Position is arbitrated by source authority (a seismic network beats a news relay), severity by the most reliable assessment. Neighbouring administrative areas covered by the same official warning stay separate events.

  3. 3

    Severity on a 0–4 scale, recomputed by us. Only events at level 3 or above become alerts. Press and radio signals are capped at level 2 and labelled “unconfirmed”: a report is not an established fact, and it never triggers a notification.

  4. 4

    Publication: country pages and the map are rebuilt every 5 minutes from these events. Statistics only count confirmed events.

Forecast, or observed fact

Every alert carries its regime. A forecast announces something that has not happened yet — a weather warning, a tornado watch, tomorrow's heat alert. An observed fact has already happened and been measured — an earthquake, an eruption, a river past its danger level. The regime drives the wording, the banner and the “I'm safe” check-in, and a forecast is never displayed as something happening “just now”.

What we refuse to display

On a safety page, what we leave out matters as much as what we show.

  • Yellow weather warnings: a nuisance, not a danger.
  • Bulletins announcing that nothing will happen — “no tsunami expected”, a contained fire, a planned burn.
  • A raw measurement (river gauge, sensor) or a lone traveller report, until an authority or a second witness backs it up.
  • Any signal we cannot place on a map: better nothing than a point invented at the centre of the country.

The context layers

Around live events, the pages carry slower-moving context — each layer named with its source and license:

  • State travel advisories — 19 foreign ministries: France (Quai d'Orsay), the UK (FCDO), the US (State Department), Canada, Germany (Auswärtiges Amt), the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Switzerland, Italy and Spain. Their zone wording is quoted verbatim; the mapping to our regions and cities is machine-proposed and list-guarded, exclusions respected. The country level you see starts from a baseline — the median of these ministries' NATIONAL levels, so a country nobody advises against stays calm; it is never the maximum of a single ministry. The areas they advise against are carried down to the region and city pages. A serious event in progress (an earthquake at red alert level, a tsunami, a cyclone) pushes the level up for a few days, then it comes back down.

  • Country context — 14 annual world series: PM2.5 air quality (IHME/GBD), safely managed drinking water (WHO/UNICEF JMP), road deaths (WHO), physicians and hospital beds per 1,000 (WHO), life expectancy (UN), new displacements by conflict and by disasters (IDMC), battle-related deaths (UCDP), intentional homicides (UNODC) — all via the World Bank (CC BY 4.0); refugees hosted, asylum seekers and internally displaced people (UNHCR); the INFORM structural risk index (JRC, European Commission). Every figure carries its year and the world median. Never a risk level, never an alert.

  • Humanitarian action — active IFRC operations (DREF, Emergency Appeals) shown as context notes with their end dates.

  • Situation reports — the latest reports by humanitarian organizations via ReliefWeb (UN OCHA, CC BY), with a factual one-sentence extract and the areas the text names.

What is written by AI

Several texts are generated by an AI model, always from our own data and never as an authority: country risk profiles and alert explanations (strictly from the figures shown on the page); the mapping of official advisory zones and of areas named in situation reports to our region and city lists — a deterministic guard keeps only names that exist in those lists, so an invented place can never appear; the translation of report titles and press headlines. Each generated text is dated, replaced versions are archived, and deterministic figures (counters, statistics, levels) are never AI-generated.

How often it updates

Fast-moving sources (earthquakes, tsunamis) are polled every 2 minutes; weather advisories every 5 minutes; volcano alert levels every 15 minutes; slower feeds every few hours; context indicators once a day. Public pages are rebuilt from snapshots at most 5 minutes old for live data, and every hour for country indexes.

Licences and attribution

The terms of every feed are read before it is ingested: what we may republish, we republish; what we may not, we leave out — even when the data would be useful. Our sources are in the public domain, under open licences with attribution, or published by their issuer for reuse; every alert names its source.

Limits — and where to double-check

Mira Safe is not an emergency service and does not replace official guidance. Our coverage depends on our sources: an event they miss, we miss. Some countries have no usable official alert feed at all (Sri Lanka, Georgia, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Peru, Central Asia…): there we see earthquakes, major disasters and foreign ministry advisories, but not local weather warnings. Before and during a trip, check your government's own travel advice:

Mira informs you. Mira is not an emergency service — in an emergency, call local emergency services. Some of this page's content is generated with the help of AI from sourced, quantified data.