🛠️ Technical Area
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← BACK TO HEAT
WAFHEAT

HOW WAF HEAT WORKS

Transparent football momentum, calculated from the news cycle.

WAF Heat is deterministic: the same input data always produces the same result, using the published formula below.
55%COVERAGE VOLUME

How many source mentions a topic has inside the selected window. Volume is logarithmically normalised against the busiest topic in the same snapshot, so one giant club cannot permanently dominate.

25%SOURCE SPREAD

How many independent publishers are contributing to the topic. A story repeated by many separate sources carries more Heat than repeated mentions from the same source.

20%MOMENTUM

The current 1H, 6H or 24H window is compared with the immediately preceding window of the same length. Acceleration lifts Heat; cooling coverage reduces it.

HEAT SCORE
0.55 × VOLUME+0.25 × SOURCE SPREAD+0.20 × MOMENTUM

The result is scaled to a 0–100 Heat Score. It is a relative momentum score for the current WAF news snapshot, not a lifetime popularity score.

THE THREE WINDOWS

1H catches breaking movement. 6H shows the active news cycle. 24H shows sustained attention. Each window compares with its own immediately previous period.

WHAT COUNTS AS A MENTION?

WAF uses its existing grouped story data, club/entity tagging and source packets. A grouped story can contribute multiple source mentions when genuinely separate publishers are covering it.

HOW OFTEN DOES IT UPDATE?

The Heat snapshot rebuilds every 10 minutes. Historical snapshots are retained so topic pages can show movement over time instead of only the latest number.

WHAT HEAT DOES NOT MEASURE

Heat is not sentiment, truth, quality, transfer probability or fan popularity. A high score means a topic is receiving broad and/or accelerating coverage right now.

BUILT FROM WAF DATA.

Heat is generated from WAF's structured football-news data using the published formula above, with every topic ranked by the same methodology.