Baltic Watch fuses only what is broadcast, published or posted about NATO's north-eastern flank: machine signals move the indicators, text claims fill a lane and never move the board. Non-commercial, no tracking, no advice.
ADS-B from adsb.fi (non-commercial), AIS from Fintraffic Digitraffic (Finnish receivers, CC BY 4.0) and aisstream.io, Portnet port calls (CC BY 4.0), Traficom nautical warnings (CC BY 4.0), EANS NOTAM, gpsjam.org daily H3 data (CC-BY), IODA internet connectivity, NASA FIRMS thermal anomalies, Global Fishing Watch events (non-commercial), Elering and Fingrid grid data (Fingrid CC BY 4.0), Litgrid cross-border flows, STUK dose rates via FMI open data (CC BY 4.0), the Lithuanian Radiation Protection Centre's RADIS network, the Belarusian NPP operator's own ASKRO posts (adversary official, context only), EMSC and University of Helsinki seismic bulletins, RSS from Baltic, Nordic and Russian outlets, Telegram public previews. Basemap: OpenStreetMap contributors, OpenFreeMap.
Thermal anomalies come from NASA FIRMS: the VIIRS and MODIS instruments on polar-orbiting satellites pass over the region several times a day and flag any pixel (375 m to 1 km across) much hotter than its surroundings. Most are gas flares, plants, field burning and forest fires. The board counts how often each spot was hot in the last 30 days, so a flare that burns every night fades into the background, while a new hot spot near a border, a depot, an airbase or a port stands out. A fire after a strike or sabotage shows up the same way, hours later, unless clouds hide it.
Seismic events come from the University of Helsinki's Institute of Seismology (automatic and reviewed bulletins) and the European EMSC. The region has few natural earthquakes, so nearly everything the networks locate here is a blast: quarries, mines and building sites, by day, on land, at the same places week after week. What deserves attention is a blast where none is expected: at sea, at night, unusually large, or close to a pipeline, cable or other facility (the 2022 Nord Stream explosions were recorded by Swedish and Danish seismographs). Those are flagged and drawn stronger.
Some areas of interest are places where something already happened: drone crashes and debris, shoot-downs, airspace violations, sabotage and arson, cable and pipeline damage, explosions. They are drawn as small muted symbols with the month and year, so a new report near one of them can be read against the history of the place; they are never live reports. Defence-industry sites (plants, factories, depots) carry a factory glyph with the operator and products in the popup. Both come from the curated list of areas, each with its confidence (confirmed, or reported: named in the press or by officials but not independently confirmed) and a source.
States are derived from simple medians per signal, not from the Phase 1 rubric; there are no scenarios yet; developing situations are a v0 grouping of related items by topic and place, with a confirmation state derived from how many independent sources carry them. AIS comes from two receiver networks, Fintraffic's Finnish coastal stations (Digitraffic) and aisstream.io's volunteer stations around the Baltic. Neither reaches the Kaliningrad coast or the port of Riga: on 2026-10-04 a whole day brought no vessel at Kaliningrad port or Riga port, five off Baltiysk, and thin coverage of the rest of the Gulf of Riga. Those waters are AIS-blind, and a vessel count of zero there means nothing was received, not that nothing sails. The Coverage layer (LAYERS, off by default) fills every cell where an AIS position arrived in the last hour, or an ADS-B position, or either, as switched there; sea or land without the fill is blind, not quiet. ADS-B comes from adsb.fi's volunteer receivers, and there are almost none in Russia and Belarus: aircraft over Leningrad oblast, Pskov, Kaliningrad or Belarus are seen only when a receiver across the border catches them, military counts there are written only when an aircraft is seen (never as zeros), and Russian military aircraft mostly do not broadcast ADS-B at all. An empty sky over Russia or Belarus is blind, not quiet.