Air Activity Monitoring

What we monitor

Public ADS-B transponder signals from aircraft operating near Baltic airspace (53–62°N, 18–32°E). Each signal contains aircraft callsign, position, altitude, speed, and heading.

Data source

• ADS-B Exchange / OpenSky Network — crowdsourced receivers
• Collection frequency: every 15 minutes via Dagu scheduler
• Collector: adsb_collector.py

What we measure

• Unique aircraft count per day within the Baltic bounding box
• Regional filtering — for each brand (Estonia, Latvia, etc.), we filter to a tighter geographic box around that country’s airspace
• Volume anomaly — when today’s count exceeds the 7-day average by more than 2 standard deviations, the status is elevated

Limitations

• Military aircraft can fly with transponders off or using non-standard codes
• ADS-B coverage depends on ground receiver density — gaps exist over open sea
• Commercial traffic dominates the count; military is a small fraction
• No way to distinguish routine training from escalation without context