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GLIDE

GLIDE is a globally common Unique ID code for disasters and emergencies. It is a unique identifier that is assigned to each disaster event by the Asian Disaster Reduction Center (ADRC).

Collection: glide-events

A STAC collection hold all the GLIDE events. An example of the GLIDE collection is here.

Data

Accessible data is a set of GLIDE entries. Each entry is a disaster event. The event data list is available in the form of a array called "glideset" via the API endpoint https://www.glidenumber.net/glide/jsonglideset.jsp.

Important

Despite what's described in the documentation, the API endpoint https://www.glidenumber.net/glide/jsonglideset.jsp cannot retrieve individual events. It is necessary to add other filter to narrow down the search (e.g. https://www.glidenumber.net/glide/jsonglideset.jsp?level1=ESP&fromyear=2024&toyear=2024&events=FL&number=2024-000199)

Event Item

A GLIDE event and episode will ALWAYS produce an event STAC item as in the example for the flood in Spain — provided its event type resolves to at least one hazard code (see the classification-failure caveat below).

The event URL of the jsonglideset API endpoint is stored in the links field of the STAC item with the via relation.

Here is a table with the fields that are mapped from the GDACS event to the STAC event:

STAC field GLIDE field Description
id event + number + geocode Unique identifier for the event
geometry longitude + latitude as geojson POINT Geometry of the event (POINT)
collection glide-events The collection for GDACS events
title humaran readable from event, location, year, month, day Name of the event
description comments Description of the event. HTML description should be privileged over plain text description and translated to markdown
datetime year + month + date Date and time of the event converted in UTC ISO 8601 format
monty:country_codes[0] geocode (fallback: reverse-geocoded point) ISO3 code from geocode. When GLIDE reports the sentinel --- (unresolved) and a geocoder is configured, the transformer instead reverse-geocodes the event's lat/lon point via MontyGeoCoder.get_iso3_from_point. If no geocoder is configured, monty:country_codes is an empty list; if a geocoder is configured but the point does not resolve to any country, the list is [null]. keywords is always built from the raw geocode value (e.g. ---), even when monty:country_codes was reverse-geocoded — the two fields can diverge
monty:country_codes[1..*] geocode List of ISO3 codes of the other countries affected by the event
monty:hazard_codes event List of hazard codes converted following the GLIDE event type to Hazard profile mapping
monty:src_event_id Source event ID Unique identifier of the event
asset.report https://www.glidenumber.net/glide/public/search/details.jsp?glide= + docid Asset with the link to the GDACS report
via link in [links] source url Link to the GDACS event details page

Hazard Item

A GLIDE event and episode will ALWAYS produce one hazard STAC item as in the example for the flood in Spain — subject to the same classification-failure caveat as the event item.

Here is a table with the STAC fields that are mapped from the GDACS event to the STAC hazard:

STAC field GLIDE field Description
id event + number + geocode Unique identifier for the event
geometry longitude + latitude as geojson POINT Geometry of the event (POINT)
collection glide-events The collection for GDACS events
title humaran readable from event, location, year, month, day Name of the event
description comments Description of the event. HTML description should be privileged over plain text description and translated to markdown
datetime year + month + date Date and time of the event converted in UTC ISO 8601 format
monty:country_codes[0] geocode (fallback: reverse-geocoded point) ISO3 code from geocode. When GLIDE reports the sentinel --- (unresolved) and a geocoder is configured, the transformer instead reverse-geocodes the event's lat/lon point via MontyGeoCoder.get_iso3_from_point. If no geocoder is configured, monty:country_codes is an empty list; if a geocoder is configured but the point does not resolve to any country, the list is [null]. keywords is always built from the raw geocode value (e.g. ---), even when monty:country_codes was reverse-geocoded — the two fields can diverge
monty:country_codes[1..*] geocode List of ISO3 codes of the other countries affected by the event
monty:hazard_codes event List of hazard codes converted following the GLIDE event type to Hazard profile mapping
monty:src_event_id Source event ID Unique identifier of the event
asset.report https://www.glidenumber.net/glide/public/search/details.jsp?glide= + docid Asset with the link to the GDACS report
via link in [links] source url Link to the GDACS event details page
monty:hazard_detail ? Detailed description of the hazard (more details in next section)

Hazard Detail

The hazard_detail field is a JSON object that contains the detailed information about the hazard. The object is a mapping of the hazard codes to the detailed information. The detailed information is a JSON object with the following fields:

STAC field GLIDE field Description
clusters event Hazard clusters codes
severity_unit glide GLIDE alert level
severity_value magnitude Magnitude of the event
Mapping from GLIDE event type to Hazard profile

There is not straightforward mapping from the GLIDE event type to the hazard profile. Most GLIDE event types resolve to a fixed UNDRR-ISC 2025 / EM-DAT / GLIDE triple in GlideTransformer.get_hazard_codes:

GLIDE event type Hazard profile cluster (2025) Hazard Profile codes (2025)
CW (Cold Wave) MH-TEMP MH0502 (Cold Wave)
DR (Drought) MH-PRECIP MH0401 (Drought)
EQ (Earthquake) GEO-SEIS GH0101 (Earthquake)
EP (Epidemic) BIO-INFECT BI0101 (Infectious Diseases, general)
EC (Extratropical Cyclone) MH-WIND MH0307 (Extra-tropical Cyclone)
FR (Fire) TECH-INDFAIL TL0305 (Fire)
FF (Flash Flood) MH-WATER MH0603 (Flash Flooding)
FL (Flood) MH-WATER MH0600 (Flooding chapeau)
HT (Heat Wave) MH-TEMP MH0501 (Heatwave)
LS (Land Slide) GEO-GFAIL GH0300 (Gravitational Mass Movement)
MS (Mud Slide) GEO-GFAIL GH0303 (Flows)
ST (Storm) MH-CONV MH0102 (Lightning (electrical storm))
TC (Tropical Cyclone) MH-WIND MH0309 (Tropical Cyclone)
TS (Tsunami) MH-MARINE MH0705 (Tsunami)
TO (Tornado) MH-WIND MH0305 (Tornado)
AV (Avalanche) MH-TERR MH0801 (Avalanche)
SS (Storm Surge) MH-MARINE MH0703 (Storm Surge)
VW (Violent Wind) MH-WIND MH0301 (Wind)
VO (Volcano) GEO-VOLC GH0201 (Lava Flows — the general/unspecified-eruption stand-in, see the volcanic note on why HIP 2025 has no volcanic chapeau)
WF (Wild Fire) ENV-FOREST EN0205 (Wildfires)

SL (Slide) and WV (Wave/Surge) are not looked up directly: get_hazard_codes remaps SL to LS and WV to SS before the table lookup above, so both resolve to the same codes as their target row.

More specific hazard codes can be added to the codes field following the characteristics of the event.

Warning

IN (Insect Infestation) has no mapping. It is a valid GLIDE event value (the source validator accepts it), but it is not a key in get_hazard_codes's mapping table, so it falls through to an empty hazard_codes list — which is the classification-failure case described below. No IN event has ever produced a STAC item.

AC (Accident): sub-classified from comments

GLIDE's AC type covers several distinct technological hazards (transport accidents, industrial fires, explosions, structural collapses, etc.), so get_hazard_codes routes it to get_ac_hazard_codes(comments) instead of a static row. That method tries two strategies, in order:

  1. Structured tag. If comments ends with a parenthesised tag such as (Road) or (Ind: Gas leak), the category (and optional Category: Subcategory) is looked up in a fixed table:
Tag key Hazard Profile codes (2025)
road TL0405 (Road Traffic Accident)
rail TL0404 (Rail Accident)
water TL0402 (Inland Water Way Accidents)
air TL0401 (Air Transportation Accident)
misc:fire, ind:fire TL0305 (Fire)
misc:explosion, ind:explosion TL0304 (Explosion)
misc:collapse, ind:collapse TL0201 (Building Collapse)
ind:gas leak, ind:chemical spill TL0301 (Leaks and Spills)
ind:other TL0207 (Critical Infrastructure Failure)

misc:other is deliberately absent — it covers cases like stampedes and poisonings that have no clear technological hazard code.

  1. Free-text fallback. If there is no recognised tag (or its key isn't in the table above), comments is matched against a series of keyword regexes for aircraft/ship/train/road-vehicle accidents, structural collapse, explosion, and fire, in that order, each mapping to the same codes as the table above.

If neither strategy matches, get_ac_hazard_codes returns an empty list — see the classification-failure caveat below.

ET (Extreme Temperature): sub-classified from comments

ET has no row of its own in HazardProfiles.csv — GLIDE conflates what UNDRR-ISC 2025 splits into Heatwave (MH0501/HT) and Cold Wave (MH0502/CW) — so get_hazard_codes routes it to get_et_hazard_codes(comments), which uses the same two-strategy approach as AC: a trailing tag ((cold wave) or (heat wave)) looked up first, then a free-text heat wave / cold wave regex fallback. If neither matches, it also returns an empty list.

Classification failure and item cardinality

make_source_event_items calls get_hazard_codes and then immediately overwrites the result with hazard_profiles.get_canonical_hazard_codes(item), which raises ValueError if the item carries no hazard codes at all. Both get_stac_items_from_file and get_stac_items_from_memory catch that exception per-row, log a warning, and increment the failed-row counter — they do not yield an event or hazard item for that row. In practice this means:

  • Every IN record is dropped (no mapping exists at all).
  • An AC or ET record is dropped if its comments field carries neither a recognisable tag nor a matching free-text keyword.
  • Every other GLIDE event type always produces its event/hazard item pair, since its codes are a fixed, non-empty triple.

Note

FR is not the wildfire code — WF is. GLIDE's vocabulary carries both (FR - Fire, WF - Wild fire), and it flags its deprecated types explicitly (FA - Famine(use other HAZARD instead), SL - SLIDE (use LS/AV/MS instead), WV - Wave/Surge(use TS/SS instead)); FR carries no such flag, so both are live. GLIDE publishes no definition beyond those labels, but its records show what FR is used for: settlement, structural and camp fires — the Kočani nightclub (FR-2025-000034-MKD), the Cox's Bazar refugee camp (FR-2023-000031-BGD), Hargeisa's main market (FR-2022-000191-SOM), Sandakan (FR-2026-000064-MYS) — against WF records that are consistently vegetation fires, many of them GDACS-fed. That is EM-DAT's tec-mis-fir-fir (Fire, Miscellaneous) as much as tec-ind-fir-fir (Fire, Industrial), and both resolve to TL0305 despite the cluster's Industrial Failure name. A few FR records are vegetation fires that should have been coded WF at the source; the mapping follows the vocabulary, not the miscodings.

Hazard Magnitude and Units

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