Daily brief

Brief: 22 September 2026

4,690 incidents were recorded worldwide on Tuesday, 22 September 2026 across 109 countries, 267 of them rated severe or extreme. Wildfires were the most common category. 62 records were rated severe or extreme by sources that monitor the whole world. Separately, 205 severe weather warnings were in force across 5 countries, almost all of them in the United States and Europe, the only places that publish such warnings as open feeds. 32% of the day's records came from hazard categories with no official feed anywhere, meaning they exist only because a journalist reported them.

4,690
Recorded
267
Severe or extreme
109
Countries
30
Categories

← 21 Sep 23 Sep → Every record for this day

Rated severe by a worldwide source 62

Every record this day that a globally-monitoring source rated severe or extreme — not a top ten. Below that rating the day held hundreds of equally-graded records, and putting eight of them in an order would be inventing a ranking the data does not contain. Severe-weather warnings are listed separately further down, because only the United States and Europe publish them and mixing the two turns a world list into a list of American counties. Sources this day: FIRMS 60, IFRC 1, GDACS 1. The day's complete record is here.

Showing the 12 most severe of 62.

Severe weather warnings

205 severe or extreme weather warnings were in force across 5 countries that day. These sit apart from the ranking above because the United States, the 38 European countries in Meteoalarm and only a handful of other national services publish warnings as open feeds — so this count rises when it storms in Ohio and cannot move at all when it storms in Bangladesh.

Severe Thunderstorm Warning — Cochran, TX; Hockley, TX; Terry, TX; Yoakum, TX 23:49 UTC · United States · NWS Severe
Special Marine Warning — Mississippi Sound; Coastal waters from Pensacola FL to Pascagoula MS out 20 NM 23:38 UTC · United States · NWS Severe
Severe Thunderstorm Warning — Davis, UT; Salt Lake, UT 23:37 UTC · United States · NWS Severe
Special Marine Warning — Waters from Okaloosa-Walton County Line to Pensacola FL from 20 to 60 NM 23:37 UTC · United States · NWS Severe
Severe Thunderstorm Warning — El Paso, CO 23:30 UTC · United States · NWS Severe

What the day was made of

Wildfire
1027
Fire
876 · news
Flood
565
Storm
495
Epidemic
369
Road Accident
197 · news
Explosion
159 · news
Drought
78
Shooting
72 · news
Air Crash
61 · news

Where this day came from

32% of the day's records are hazards with no official real-time feed anywhere in the world.

3,168 records came from instruments and official feeds — seismic networks, satellites, warning services. 1,522 exist only because a journalist wrote something.

That second number is the honest measure of this brief's blind spot: it is thinnest exactly where local media is thinnest, and a quiet country here is not evidence of a quiet day there. The per-hazard breakdown →

What this brief will not tell you

Whether this was a busy day or a quiet one.

Daily totals on this site have run from 24 to 4,237, and almost none of that spread is the world — it is our own monitoring changing: the collection schedule, a timezone fix, and three new feeds added in September.

Comparing one day against another would measure our instruments and call it news. That comparison becomes possible once the source list has been stable for a month. The same reasoning, at greater length →