Terms of Use & Copyright

The short version

• Look at anything, free, no account. That will not change.
• Embed the live map on your own site — encouraged. Get the code.
• Quote us with a link. Short quotes with attribution are fine.
• Do not mirror the site, bulk-copy the guides, or scrape the data files.
• Do not frame the site inside your own — the embeds exist for that, and they are better.

What we do not own

Most of what you see on the map is public data, and it is not ours. The observations, forecasts, positions and measurements come from NOAA, NASA, the USGS, national weather services and other public bodies and open datasets. Those agencies own or have released their own data under their own terms, and nothing on this page claims otherwise. Facts are not copyrightable, and we do not pretend they are.

If you want the underlying data, go to the source — it is genuinely free and it will be fresher than anything you copy from us. Every feed we use is named on the about & editorial standards page, with a link.

What we do own

Four things on this site are original work, and those are protected by copyright:

• The written guides and explainers. Every article in the Guides, Trackers and Cities sections was written for this site. These are the most-copied thing on any data site and they are unambiguously ours.
• The code, interface and design system. The map engine, the layer system, the page templates and the visual design.
• The selection and arrangement of the data. Individual facts are free; the decisions about which sources to combine, how to clean and join them, and how to present them together are a compilation, and compilations are protected separately from the facts inside them. Our processed datasets carry verification markers so a copy can be identified as a copy.
• The name and brand.“LiveEarthViewer” and “LEV”, the logo, and the look of the site.

What you may do

• Embed the live map. Free, on any site, commercial or not, via the embed builder. The widget keeps a small badge linking back — leave it in place and you have our permission in full.
• Quote and cite. Short excerpts with clear attribution and a link to the page you took them from. Normal quoting, normal courtesy.
• Link to anything. Deep links to any page or layer are welcome and always will be.
• Screenshot for editorial, teaching and personal use, with credit.

What you may not do

• Mirror or republish the site, in whole or in substantial part.
• Copy the written guides onto another site, with or without edits, and including machine-rewritten versions of them.
• Bulk-download the processed data filesor use our API endpoints from anywhere other than this site. These endpoints exist to serve this site's visitors and are paid for on that basis. The upstream sources are free and public — use them directly.
• Frame or wrap the site inside another site or app, or present it as your own. The embeds are the supported way to put this map somewhere else, and we would rather you used them.
• Remove or obscure attribution, ours or a data provider's.

No warranty — and this one matters

LiveEarthViewer is provided as-is, for general information. It is not an official warning service and must never be used as one. Data can be delayed, wrong or missing. For any decision where safety, property or money is at stake — severe weather, aviation, marine, evacuation — use your official national service. We accept no liability for decisions made on the basis of what you see here.

Reporting infringement

If you believe content here infringes your copyright, or if you have found this site's content republished somewhere else, get in touch via @simplifaisoul with the URL, what specifically was taken, and where the original lives. Reports in both directions are read and acted on.

Changes

These terms may be updated as the site grows. The effective date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. Substantive changes will not be applied retroactively to embeds already deployed in good faith.