You can download a pdf version of this graphic with clickable links from my itchio page.

Noticed something a little funky in the world around you and want to figure out what’s up? Especially if there might be something you ought to be doing about it? Not sure what information sources to trust these days? If you’re in the US, federal agencies like NOAA, USGS, EPA and more collect massive amounts of scientific data every day, much of which is publicly available online – if you know where to look.

Since the wildfire smoke has been hitting the east coast this summer, I’ve gotten a lot of comments when posting about the air quality impact that were variations on: “huh. I was wondering why the sky looked so funny.” With the state of the Internet, search engines, and social media today, it really isn’t intuitive where you can go to find reliable information on something so vague as “I noticed something was a little off today,” and so many of the platforms and accounts that emergency managers have spent years building up trust and visibility for have disappeared or become unverifiable because of Twitter’s meltdown. Best to go to straight to the source when you can. 

This flowchart is solely focused on the US federal government and is not meant to be comprehensive, but provides a starting point for anyone looking for more information.