Where Earth is breaking heat records
Published 2 July 2026
Record heat isn't happening somewhere — it's happening almost everywhere. Our new Heat Tracker is a live map of the past week's peak temperatures, colored by how far they ran above normal.
Alongside the GDP Atlas, we've been quietly building out a Data section: interactive maps about what's actually happening on the planet right now. Heat Tracker is the newest, and the timeliest.
What it shows
Open the map and you'll see the last week's peak temperature for every country, every US state and every Chinese province. The colour isn't the raw temperature — it's the anomaly, how far each place ran above (or below) its own normal for this time of year. That's the honest way to read heat: 30 °C is unremarkable in one place and alarming in another. Places that just set a new all-time high get flagged.
Where the numbers come from
The temperatures are built from NASA's POWER dataset — the same satellite-era climate record scientists use — and the map is rebuilt every week, automatically. No estimates, no vibes: just the measured peak for each region against its long-run normal.
Why we made it
Big climate numbers are easy to nod at and hard to feel. A single map that says "here is your province, here is how unusual this week was, and yes, that red patch just broke a record" does something a headline can't. It makes the abstract local. And like everything on SpecEnvoy, it's free, it works on any phone, and it doesn't track you.
Have a look at your part of the world this week.