Most monitoring answers from one image, or from the latest pair. CZDTS answers from the whole archive: every usable pass since 2017, rebuilt into a per-asset history with calibrated uncertainty. It runs on free satellite data by default, buys a sharper or independent capture only when a specific asset raises a specific question, and takes your own ground instrumentation into the same record when the sky cannot settle it.
One site, exactly as the report renders it: eight tailings facilities at a working copper mine in Arizona, watched for nearly four years on free satellite data.
Draw an area and the platform backfills the public satellite archive from 2017, then keeps appending. At one tailings site in Arizona that comes to 22,108 state rows across eight facilities in three and a half years, built from up to 891 optical passes, 282 radar passes and 147 high-resolution scenes per facility, plus 106 interferograms on a twelve-day chain. Nothing is answered from a single scene, because a single scene cannot tell you whether what you are looking at is unusual for this asset. Normal is defined by the asset’s own history, which means the detector needs no failures to run.
A vertical is not a separate product. It is a trained model plus a trigger definition running on the same engine, over the same data backbone, producing the same four numbers. That is what makes a second vertical cheap and a claim about the first one checkable.
The free layer is wide, continuous and coarse, and it carries the screening. When it raises something, two things make the answer firmer: a sharper picture of the same ground, and an independent capture that was not part of the record the finding came from. Both are one tasking order away. And where the sky cannot settle it at all, your own ground instrumentation joins the same record rather than living in a separate system. Three rungs, one lineage, and money spent only when a specific asset raises a specific question.
Live figures from a read-only availability run over Pinto Valley, a 148 km² box, across the previous 365 days. The search returned 535 archive offers and 53 tasking products, of which 16 were orderable as asked.
| Option | Resolution | Indicative cost | Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentinel-1 & Sentinel-2 | 10–20 m | free | The continuous screening layer. Always on. |
| Very-high optical, archive | 0.50–0.65 m | from $16 | Cheapest look at what the site already looked like. |
| SPOT, archive | 1.5 m | from $322 | Wide context around a firing. |
| Super-high optical, archive | 0.30–0.49 m | from $399 | Reading a crest, a breach or a spill margin. |
| Umbra SAR, tasked | 0.25–1 m | $675–3,250 | Confirmation through cloud and at night. |
| ICEYE SAR, tasked | 0.25–1 m | $1,050–3,500 | As above, different revisit and look geometry. |
| Satellogic / GEOSAT, tasked | 0.5–1 m | ≈ $1,190 | A fresh optical capture of the box. |
| Vexcel aerial | 12 cm | $2,024 | Where satellite resolution will not settle it. |
| Vantor 30 cm FlexView, tasked | 0.30 m | ≈ $4,830 | The most expensive answer, for the box as drawn. |
Prices are what the SkyFi and UP42 APIs returned for that area and window, and will differ for yours. SkyFi returned 516 of the 535 archive offers and most of the listed tasking prices; UP42 tasking products quote rather than list, so they carry no headline figure. Orders carry a recorded margin and the licence chosen at purchase. Delivered scenes are chipped onto the area's grid and become inputs like any other, which means a confirmation is not a separate report but a new row in the same lineage.
Choosing a confirming capture means knowing which operator images the wavelengths in question, what they publish as a rate, and what minimum order they will bill you for regardless of how small your area is. We keep that survey current and public: the Earth observation procurement reference covers every operating provider across optical, hyperspectral, radar and thermal, alongside the free public missions and the zero-cost routes open to university researchers. It states plainly which operators publish nothing, and where a figure came from a reseller rather than the operator.
Every kind of asset gets a short checklist: the things that ought to stay true if it is behaving normally. A dam crest should not be moving faster than it was. The gap between the water and the top of the dam should not be shrinking. Water should not be appearing on the outer face. We call these invariants, and each one is checked on its own, against what this asset’s own history says is normal for it.
Invariants are archetype-specific but the shape repeats. A conveyance asks whether water is outside the prism and whether a segment is departing while its neighbours are not. A closure asks whether the cap is eroding and whether vegetation is failing to establish. The catalogue in §06 lists which are built.
Monitoring products usually report detections. Detections alone cannot be underwritten, because nothing in them says how often the system is wrong. These four travel together, per asset, in every vertical.
| Number | What it is | How it is obtained |
|---|---|---|
| State with confidence | The estimated condition of the asset now, as a distribution rather than a label. | Assimilation over the observation record, with a per-stream error model. |
| Lead time | How far ahead the trigger fired on events that actually happened. | Replay against dated historical events recorded in the site specification. |
| False alarm rate | How often the same trigger fires on assets that did not fail. | The identical detector run over matched control assets; alerts on controls are recorded identically. |
| Skill against persistence | Whether the model beats the naive assumption that nothing changes. | Scored on the same record, so a model that only repeats yesterday is visible as such. Where a record is too short or too sparse to score it, the statement says so rather than reporting a zero. |
No self-serve or enterprise monitoring vendor we have found publishes a false alarm rate, an observability limit, or a calibrated uncertainty. The documented failure mode in the largest mandated market for satellite-derived estimates is precisely uncertainty in those estimates. An insurer, a registry or an Engineer of Record cannot act on a detection whose error rate is unknown, which is why the four numbers are the deliverable and the imagery is not.
Suppose one of those invariant checks comes back with nothing to report. That can mean two very different things: the check ran and found nothing wrong, or the check never ran at all, because there was no usable satellite data that month. Most monitoring tools show you the same silence either way. We separate them, on every check, on every run.
The invariant was measurable on this asset in this window, and the state sits inside the expectation the asset's own history defines. This is the only case in which silence means anything.
Measurable, and outside expectation past a stated threshold that has held for a stated length of time. You get an alert, an evidence pack of before and after images, the series, and a link to the manifest.
The archive could not support the question: no scene, an incoherent or disconnected interferogram network, an unmeasured unit, no named control. No claim is made, and the statement says which.
This is enforced in the engine rather than left to good intentions. A check with no data behind it is shown as unmeasured, never as a flat line at zero. Where a site has no comparable asset to measure it against, the report says so and substitutes nothing.
An archetype is a family of assets that share a physics and a set of invariants. Trained once, it applies to every asset of that kind an area contains.
| Archetype | What it covers | Invariants | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tailings & impoundment integrity | Tailings dams, ash ponds, leach and evaporation ponds, water dams, lagoons. Pond encroachment and growth, face wetness, toe seepage, crest movement. | 7 of 7 | Built |
| Corridor & conveyance integrity | Canals, pipelines, levees, penstocks, embanked rail and road. Water outside the design prism, one segment departing while its neighbours do not, outer slope wetness, movement at a crossing. | 5 of 5 | Built |
| Subsurface & surface risk | Disposal clusters, well pads, geothermal, brine and groundwater basins. The premise is that a subsurface programme should leave no surface expression: deformation rate and its change, a new water body, an expanding scar, a new depression, a plume persisting past its clock. | 5 of 5 | Built |
| Closure & post-closure assurance | Closed impoundments, landfills, capped remediation, legacy mine ground, plugged well sites. Ponding on a cap that should shed water, cover loss beyond its seasonal band, settlement beyond the consolidation curve, a seep at the toe. The payers are bond holders and long-tail liability holders. | 4 of 4 | Built |
| Construction progress assurance | Airports, dams under construction, tailings raises, highway packages, data centre builds. A package outside its planned envelope, clearing beyond the permitted boundary, offsite sediment. Without a milestone plan there is nothing to test against. | 4 of 4 | Built |
| Operating rule & project conformance | Reservoirs, irrigation districts, wetland and blue carbon projects, forest concessions, recharge basins. Water outside the rule band, project conversion, survival shortfall, leakage in the belt. The design document is the rule curve. | 4 of 4 | Built |
| Terminal & plant conformance | Refineries, tank farms, LNG, chemical plants, concentrators, data centre campuses. Liquid inside a containment bund, an activity index departing while operations are declared normal, a new discharge outside the perimeter, a flare or thermal anomaly. Declared but not built: no site has been chosen, so nothing is trained or validated. | — | Declared |
Some signals cut across several families and are declared once rather than rebuilt in each. The emissions overlay is the first: plume detection, attribution to a registered asset, rate estimation and the regulatory clock are common machinery, while what a plume means depends on the asset under it. It binds into subsurface risk, where a plume persisting past its clock is one of the five invariants, and into closure, where it has been run against the free Carbon Mapper catalogue over an oil and gas county. Thermal and flaring, and water quality, are the same shape and follow later.
Seven families, and twenty-nine verticals classified across them. A vertical is the thing that is actually sold: one asset family, one set of checks, one trained model. Release v0.20.0; backend suite 1,158 passed and 4 skipped, API suite 232 passed.
The front end never computes. Every number on screen is a row the engine wrote, and the same rows are what the API returns and what the statement prints, so a figure quoted in a meeting and a figure pulled by a partner's application cannot disagree.
Operators already have dashboards. What they do not have, and what everyone downstream of them needs, is an assessment that does not come from the party being assessed.
The useful first conversation names one asset and one thing you currently cannot see about it. We will tell you whether the free archive can answer it, what the confirmation would cost if it cannot, and what the four numbers look like for that class of asset today.