Magnitude

Intensity WITHIN this event’s own domain (0-10). The coder picks the path whose native unit the event actually has and reports ONE observable; a fixed published formula turns it into the score.

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What it is for

• Ranking incidents WITHIN one domain — the ten most intense strikes this week, the worst outages this month.
• Setting a floor on a monitoring feed so a trickle of minor incidents does not bury a severe one (magnitude_min).
• Separating a fatal clash from a non-lethal one without parsing casualty prose yourself.
• Reading severity where no one died — a grid collapse or a mass displacement scores on its own domain scale rather than at zero.

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Filter on it

magnitude_min and magnitude_max on GET /api/v2/events, range 0–10. Published only for the cameoplus family — filtering on it excludes every event outside that family.

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Formula

$$\text{magnitude} = \begin{cases} 0 & \text{conflict},\; d = 0 \\[4pt] \min\!\bigl(10,\; 2 + 2\log_{10} d\bigr) & \text{conflict},\; d > 0 \\[4pt] \operatorname{clamp}(t,\, 0,\, 10) & \text{hazard, verbal, economic} \end{cases}$$ Every sub-factor is clamped to its stated range before it enters the equation, and the result is rounded to 2 decimal places. Reproducing a served value needs both.

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What the coder scores

The coder reads these off the article and records a reason for each. The scaler above turns them into the value — nothing else feeds it.

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path

conflict = violence with a death toll · hazard = natural/technological disaster · verbal = diplomatic/political speech act · economic = economic/corporate/tech

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value

The exact text the coder receives

conflict → the FATALITY COUNT (use -1 if no count is stated and none is inferable; do NOT use 0, which asserts nobody died). hazard → a 0-10 realized-impact severity tier (1 minor local · 3 significant local · 5 severe regional · 7 major/national · 9-10 catastrophic; this is a severity TIER, not a moment magnitude — use an Mw reading only when the event IS an earthquake and the text states one). verbal → the CAMEO coercion tier 0-10 (peace/truce 1 · appeal/intent 2 · neutral/symbolic 3 · accuse 4 · demand/protest 5 · threaten-nonforce 6 · sanction/threaten-force 7-8 · use-force/invade/mass-violence 9-10). economic → an impact tier 0-10 (routine 1-3 · significant 4-6 · major/systemic 7-8 · paradigm/collapse 9-10).

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The frameworks it adapts

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MEPV — Major Episodes of Political Violence

What we take from it. The anchored 1-10 magnitude scale, and Richardson’s log-of-deaths slope laid onto it, so a fatality count becomes a tier that is comparable across kinds of violence rather than a raw body count. We publish no current third-party application for this one — we adapt the scale, not a live programme.

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EM-DAT — the international disaster database

What we take from it. The realized-impact severity tier for the hazard path — scoring what a disaster actually did to people and systems, rather than a physical intensity reading. In current use by UNDRR, which uses EM-DAT as an indicator source for Sendai Framework global-target monitoring.

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The full citation trail

Domain severity scales — Richardson Magnitude / MEPV for violence, an EM-DAT-style realized-impact severity tier for hazards, the CAMEO coercion ladder for diplomacy and politics, an anchored impact tier for economic, corporate and technology events. Magnitude compares WITHIN a domain; significance is how you sort events against each other. We ADAPT the structure and vocabulary of these frameworks. None of the bodies named endorses, reviews, or is connected to this metric, and their use does not make our values empirical measurements.

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Worked examples

Real events from the corpus, scored by the coder and frozen here on 2026-08-19 — check the arithmetic against the formula above. They are snapshots, not live lookups: an event can be re-coded, and an example that changed underneath its own arithmetic would be worse than none.

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Syrian security forces detain seven after Latakia custody death

Syria · 2026-08-13 The conflict path with a real fatality count. One death is the first anchor: 2 + 2·log10(1) = 2.0. A count, not a tier. $$\min\!\bigl(10,\; 2 + 2\log_{10} 1\bigr) = 2 + 0 = \mathbf{2.0}$$ magnitude = 2 — what GET /api/v2/events returns for this event.

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Britain seizes Russian tanker Smyrtos in English Channel

United Kingdom · 2026-08-13 The verbal path — the CAMEO coercion ladder. Nobody died, and the event is still a 9, because seizing property by force sits near the top of that ladder. $$\operatorname{clamp}(t,\,0,\,10) = \operatorname{clamp}(9,\,0,\,10) = \mathbf{9.0}$$ magnitude = 9 — what GET /api/v2/events returns for this event.

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Vessel owners reduce Strait of Hormuz traffic amid standoff

Iran · 2026-08-11 The economic path. A shipping chokepoint thinning out is a 7 on the impact tier with no casualties and no coercive act at all. $$\operatorname{clamp}(t,\,0,\,10) = \operatorname{clamp}(7,\,0,\,10) = \mathbf{7.0}$$ magnitude = 7 — what GET /api/v2/events returns for this event.

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When it is NULL

null when the coder found no usable severity observable — on the conflict path, when the text states no fatality count and none is inferable. null means UNKNOWN, and it is never coerced to 0: a 0 on the conflict path is a REAL observation (a non-lethal clash), so the two must not be read the same way. Magnitude is the only one of the four metrics that is served as an explicit null; the other three are absent from the response instead.

What this number does not claim

These are the readings the definition does not support — building on one of them is building on a promise nobody made.

• NOT importance, and NOT comparable across domains. A conflict-9 and a technology-9 are not the same “size”. October 7 scores 8.2 on ~1,200 deaths while the Trump-rally shooting scores 2.6 on 2 deaths — physical intensity, not importance. Use significance, the only cross-domain ranking number.
• A conflict-path 0 is NOT a missing value — it is a real observation (a non-lethal clash). Unknown is NULL; see nullWhen.
• The hazard path is NOT Moment Magnitude (Mw). It is a realized-impact severity tier; Mw is used only when the event IS an earthquake and the text states a reading.
• An unmeasured magnitude is NOT neutral downstream. significance drops the magnitude term AND its 0.20 weight when magnitude_measured = 0, which is arithmetically identical to mean-imputing the other three metrics into the magnitude slot — a measured swing of up to ±0.22, roughly 4× the noise floor. An event whose magnitude would have been low relative to its other metrics is systematically promoted by being unmeasured, and a high-magnitude one demoted.

What applies to all four metrics — the frameworks we adapt, how thin the registry coverage is, and the smallest single-event difference worth reading — is on Limits and error bars.