A forecast you can check, not just read

Attribution

Ashif Ahmed Shuvo (Master's thesis author, ORCID 0009-0003-5734-1519) — HazardNet: multi-hazard early warning for Bangladesh agriculture. Master's thesis, Department of Agrometeorology, Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), supervised by Dr. Ahmed Khairul Hasan (Supervisor).

Shuvo, A. A. HazardNet: multi-hazard early warning for Bangladesh agriculture. Master's thesis, Department of Agrometeorology, Bangladesh Agricultural University. https://github.com/myself-aas/HazardNet

What this platform is for

The operational question in Bangladesh agriculture is rarely whether a hazard is coming; it is which districts, at which crop stage, with how many days of lead time, and how much weight the number deserves. HazardNet is built to answer that second set of questions. For each district and horizon it publishes a hazard class, a severity index, a confidence bin and an independent physics estimate: and the run they came from.

• 64 districts on the live map; the published advisory archive covers 507 ADM3 units (495 upazilas plus 12 city corporations).
• Eight hazard classes: cold wave, drought, fire, flash flood, flood, heat wave, severe local storm and tropical cyclone.
• Free and non-commercial, with no account needed for the map. The app installs as a PWA, caches its tiles and keeps working when the connection does not.

The current outlook, and where to see it

This page is the record; the live map is the outlook. The split is deliberate and documented, because the two questions need different pages: "where is the hazard now" is answered by a map, and "who produced this, from what, and how would I know if it stopped working" is answered by a document with dates on it.

The strip under the headline reads the committed alert artifact on every load: how many alerts are published at each level, how many districts the last run covered, and how many assessed rows the publication gate withheld. When nothing is published it says so, and says why: silence on a hazard platform is read as safety, so this page does not leave that to be inferred.

• The live map addresses all 64 districts. A district the current run does not cover keeps its static baseline colour and says so on its own page, rather than borrowing a neighbour's number.
• Every published alert carries its own evidence: the drivers behind the level, the policy version applied, and whether a duty officer reviewed it or the engine published it on its own at or below its configured ceiling.
• The status page carries the age of every artifact this deployment ships, measured against the SLO it is held to, together with the notes each run reports against itself.

What a forecast is

Every forecast on HazardNet is a published record: one district, one hazard class, a severity value, a confidence score and 7- and 15-day horizons, stamped with the date of the run that produced it. No forecast, alert or figure on this site is produced by a language model: every number is read from a committed artifact, and no number is interpolated to fill a gap in a run.

• Results only: how a record is generated is research-private and is not published.
• Every figure on this site traces to a published forecast record with a forecast date.
• Two severity tracks are reported per record, a skill track and a physics track, each shown with its own honest label.

How to check any number on this site

A claim that cannot be checked is marketing. The platform therefore publishes the evidence next to the claim, including the places where the evidence is thin.

• The status page reads the committed artifacts and states the age of each against its SLO: including when a source is stale, failing or unprovenanced, which is the case the page exists to show.
• The validation scorecard reports per-episode detection counts for five historical episodes and states plainly what those numbers cannot support.
• The model card lists the known failure modes and the out-of-scope uses, and carries the 2,931-event training claim as reported rather than verified: that archive is not redistributed by this repository, and the pages that would need it say it is absent instead of quoting the figure as if it had been read.
• The code, the artifacts and the build scripts are in one public repository, and this site is rebuilt from them: the same pipeline that publishes a number also publishes the check on it.

Knowledge products

The dated products this deployment publishes. The reviewed date is the review date the page itself carries, so a stale product can be seen to be stale.

The official record, and where it lives

HazardNet does not issue warnings, cyclone signals or evacuation instructions, and it must never be read as doing so. The bodies that do are named below; their bulletins outrank anything on this site.

• Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD): weather forecasts, cyclone signals, and heat, cold and storm warnings.
• Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre (FFWC): river-level forecasts and flood bulletins.
• Department of Disaster Management (DDM), Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief: the Standing Orders on Disaster, relief and response.
• In an emergency, call the national hotline 999, and follow your local administration’s instructions over anything published here.

Take part

The platform is maintained as a Master’s thesis project at Bangladesh Agricultural University, and it improves fastest where practitioners push back on it.

• Use it in the field and report where it was wrong. A district, a date and what you observed is enough to act on.
• Reuse the data: the download centre carries the forecast snapshot and the offline builds, and the code is MIT-licensed with the citation given on this page.
• Report a broken page, a stale run or a prediction that looks wrong from the contact page: every report is read.

Questions and answers