Live site: bdgroves.github.io/PELE
"The coffee tastes like something crawled in the pot and died."
Harry Dalton never trusted a quiet volcano. The hot springs were too hot. The lake was too acidic. The trees were dying in patterns that crept downslope like the mountain was breathing wrong. He'd been to Colombia. He'd been to the Philippines. He knew what the prelude looked like — not the explosion itself, but the weeks before, when the data says something is coming and the town council says you're going to hurt the economy.
In Dante's Peak, the USGS guy was right about everything and nobody listened until the church steeple was on fire. In the real world, it's more complicated. The USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory has been monitoring Kīlauea for over a century — longer than any other volcano observatory on Earth — and when they say the forecast window for episode 44 is April 6–14, they mean it. They've watched 43 episodes of this eruption cycle unfold since December 2024. They've calibrated their tiltmeters. They've mapped the inflate-deflate rhythm of a magma chamber that breathes like a sleeping giant. They know exactly how much microradian tilt means tomorrow versus next week.
This is what real volcano monitoring looks like. Not Pierce Brosnan outrunning pyroclastic flows in a pickup truck. Real data. Real APIs. Real science. Served six times a day by a GitHub Actions cron job.
PELE is a live monitoring dashboard for the six volcanoes of Hawai'i, built for a birthday trip to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park in May 2026. It pulls real-time data from USGS APIs, embeds live HVO webcam feeds, and tracks the ongoing episodic lava fountaining eruption at Kīlauea — an eruption style not seen at the summit since the 1980s.
The timing is absurd. Episode 44 is forecast to begin between April 6 and 14. The south vent started precursory overflows on April 3. The NWS issued a Special Weather Statement about potential tephra fall in downwind communities. Pele is warming up.
| Tab | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Overview | Alert status (WATCH/ORANGE), eruption episode tracker, live earthquake count, YouTube V1cam livestream, latest HVO notice |
| Webcams | Three YouTube livestream embeds (V1/V2/V3) auto-discovered via YouTube Data API, plus 9 Kīlauea and 3 Mauna Loa static webcam snapshots refreshed every few minutes from USGS servers |
| Earthquakes | 7-day seismicity catalog within 100 km of Kīlauea summit — magnitude color-coding, depth, location, summary stats. Live from USGS FDSN API |
| Volcano Profiles | All 6 HVO-monitored Hawaiian volcanoes: Kīlauea, Mauna Loa, Hualālai, Mauna Kea, Haleakalā, and Kama'ehuakanaloa (the submarine seamount that will someday become Hawai'i's next island) |
| Eruption Log | Timeline of the episodic fountaining episodes since December 23, 2024 — including Episode 42's 1,000-foot north vent fountain and the V3cam that got buried under 30 feet of tephra during Episode 38 |
| Visitor Hazards | Vog, Pele's hair, tephra fall, volcanic gas, ground cracking — everything you need to know before walking up to an active volcano on your birthday |
"You've never seen it miss this house, and miss that house, and come after you."
Jo Harding said that about tornadoes. Bill Paxton's face when he saw the F5 bearing down on them — that's the face of someone who has spent their whole career studying something from a safe distance and is now standing in the middle of it.
Twister understood something fundamental about field science: you can have all the instruments in the world, but at some point someone has to drive into the storm and put DOROTHY in the path of the funnel. The HVO scientists do the same thing. They hike across fresh tephra fields. They service webcams on the rim of a crater that has buried cameras under 30 feet of volcanic glass. When the V3cam got destroyed by Episode 38's lava fountain on December 6, 2025, they had a new one deployed in a safer spot within two weeks. A broad arcing fountain had extended over 600 meters and buried the camera. They went back.
The sequel understood it too. In Twisters, Tyler Owens wasn't just chasing storms for content — he was trying to prove you could weaken a tornado by seeding it at the right moment. The science was speculative, but the instinct was right: get close enough to understand it, and maybe you can change the outcome. That's what HVO's episodic forecasting model does. Forty-three episodes of observation have taught them the inflate-pause-overflow-fountain rhythm well enough to predict the next episode within a week-long window. They've earned that precision the hard way — by watching, measuring, and occasionally running.
"If you feel it, it's already too late."
That's not from a movie. That's basic volcanology. By the time you feel the earthquake swarm, the magma is already moving. The dashboard exists so you can watch the tiltmeters and the tremor signals before you feel anything. So you can see the precursory overflows from the south vent on the V1cam livestream and know that the next fountaining episode is days away, not weeks.
Same pattern as the rest of the collection — Sierra Streamflow, EDGAR, brooksgroves.com:
PELE/
├── .github/workflows/fetch.yml ← Cron every 6 hours
├── data/
│ ├── earthquakes.json ← USGS FDSN earthquake catalog
│ ├── volcanoes.json ← HANS API alert levels
│ └── notices.json ← HVO daily updates
├── fetch.py ← Python 3.12 stdlib only
├── index.html ← Plain HTML/CSS/JS, no frameworks
└── README.md
The pattern: fetch.py runs in GitHub Actions, pulls from USGS APIs, writes static JSON to data/. The frontend reads data/ first, falls back to live client-side API calls if the cached data isn't available. Everything is plain HTML/CSS/JS. No build step. No npm. No React. Just files.
Dual data source: The earthquake data loads both from the Actions-generated JSON and directly from the USGS FDSN API client-side. Whichever responds, the dashboard has data. Belt and suspenders.
YouTube livestream auto-discovery: On page load, JS hits the YouTube Data API to search for currently-live streams on the USGS channel, matches them to V1/V2/V3 by title, and embeds them as iframes. If the API call fails, clickable thumbnails with the latest webcam snapshots serve as fallback.
| Source | Endpoint | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| USGS Earthquake Hazards | earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/query |
Every 6 hours (Actions) + live client-side |
| USGS HANS Public API | volcanoes.usgs.gov/hans-public/api/volcano/ |
Every 6 hours |
| USGS HANS Notices | volcanoes.usgs.gov/hans-public/api/notice/ |
Every 6 hours |
| HVO Webcam Images | volcanoes.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/cams/{ID}/images/M.jpg |
Every page load (updated every few minutes by USGS) |
| YouTube Data API | googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search |
Every page load (discovers current livestream IDs) |
| USGS YouTube Livestreams | youtube.com/@usgs/streams |
24/7 live video from V1cam, V2cam, V3cam |
Kīlauea began its current eruption on December 23, 2024 — Christmas Eve eve — from two vents in the southwest part of Halema'uma'u crater. It immediately established a pattern nobody had seen at the summit since Pu'u 'Ō'ō in the 1980s: episodic lava fountaining. Short bursts of spectacular fountains, generally lasting less than 12 hours, separated by inflationary pauses that stretch from days to weeks.
By April 2026, the volcano has produced 43 episodes. The north vent fountain during Episode 42 reached approximately 300 meters — about 1,000 feet — visible from restaurants in Hilo. The V3cam on the south rim was destroyed by Episode 38 when a broad arcing fountain extended over 600 meters and buried it under 10 meters of tephra. HVO deployed a replacement within two weeks.
The eruption is within a closed area of the park. You can't walk up to it. But you can see the glow at night from the public viewing areas on Crater Rim Drive, and during a fountaining episode, the plume is visible from across the island. If you're in the park when Episode 44 kicks off — which the tiltmeter data suggests could happen any day now — you'll know. Everyone on the island will know.
"What's the update on the mountain?" "She's just clearing her throat."
Pele (Pelehonuamea — "Pele of the red earth") is the Hawaiian elemental force of creation that manifests as molten lava. Halema'uma'u crater, within the summit caldera of Kīlauea, is her home. The episodic fountaining eruption happening right now is, in the Hawaiian understanding, Pele reshaping the land. The tephra that falls on Volcano Village — the glassy strands called Pele's hair, the tear-shaped droplets called Pele's tears — carry her name because they are, in every sense, pieces of her.
The USGS measures the eruption in microradians and tonnes of SO₂. The Hawaiian tradition measures it in stories that stretch back centuries. Both traditions agree on one thing: this mountain is alive, and it will do what it wants.
PELE joins a growing set of automated, data-driven dashboards:
| Project | What | Data |
|---|---|---|
| PELE | Hawai'i Volcanoes Observatory Dashboard | USGS/HVO, earthquakes, webcams, alerts |
| EDGAR | Mariners & Rainiers Analytics Dashboard | pybaseball, mlb-statsapi, Statcast |
| Sierra Streamflow | USGS Streamflow Monitor — 8 Sierra gages | USGS NWIS, 20-year historical |
| brooksgroves.com | Personal web portal | GitHub Actions, Goodreads, Untappd, weather |
All share the same DNA: GitHub Actions writing static JSON, plain HTML/CSS/JS frontend, no frameworks, no build steps, hosted on GitHub Pages. Data pipelines that run while you sleep.
# Fetch fresh data (Python 3.12, stdlib only)
python fetch.py
# Serve locally
python -m http.server 8000
# Open http://localhost:8000Data: USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory · USGS Earthquake Hazards Program · YouTube Data API · Public Domain
Built for a birthday trip to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park · 2026
"The mountain is ready. The question is whether we are."