Devlog by @subhansh

7h 37m 31s logged

Today was about giving the satellite engine a skeleton key.

The satellite engine could see, but it couldn’t understand. Day 2 was all about layering context on top of context until patterns start to surface.

Environmental Layer First

ISRIC SoilGrids v2.0: Pulled clay percentage, sand, silt, pH, and organic carbon. Every number comes with uncertainty bounds because soil data is never clean.
USGS Earthquake Catalogs: If a location has had 20+ quakes, that’s active fault territory and anything buried is scrambled.
WorldPop Population Density: Tells you whether you’re looking at farmland or wilderness.
Water Table Depth: Estimated from elevation. Shallow groundwater rots organic material; deep water means preservation.

Archaeological Databases

Wikidata & Pleiades: Hit Wikidata SPARQL directly for Pleiades entries—that’s every known archaeological site in the ancient world.
GBIF Species Occurrence: Cross-referenced with GBIF data (civilizations cluster near water and arable land, and species distribution proves it).
NOAA World Magnetic Model: Plugged in NOAA’s WMM for IGRF magnetic field calculations—buried structures distort local magnetic fields.
NASA VIIRS Nighttime Lights (VNP46A2): Added night light data to map modern human activity patterns.
Geospatial Helpers: Integrated OpenTopography DEM availability checks, geocoding via Nominatim, and full site suitability scoring based on known site proximity, climate, and magnetic anomalies.

Web Archive Evidence

Wayback Machine CDX API: Search by place name and coordinates, running archaeological keyword matching across archived pages.
OSM Overpass: Querying historic and heritage feature tags.
Building Density Analysis: Sparse buildings in a fertile area = something’s off.

Cross-Reference Engine

Pleiades, Wikidata, GBIF, and VIIRS nightlights all get matched against each other. If an ancient settlement shows up in three sources but the area is now empty, that’s a red flag.

Temporal Trends: Pulled temperature trends from Open-Meteo (2020–2023) to analyze climate shifts.
Batch Scanning: Built batch capabilities so you can process 20 sets of coordinates simultaneously.

Fusion Engine — The Actual Brain

Took every data source and wired them into a 7-component weighted scoring system:

Satellite Anomaly Score (35%)
Signal strength × data quality × inverse correlation bonus when NDVI/NDWI/thermal agree.
Soil Preservation (20%)
Clay > 350g/kg = +35%, Sand > 600g/kg = -25%, pH 6.5–8.0 sweet spot.
Seismic Filter (10%)
20+ quakes = -25%, Moderate = -10%, Quiet = neutral.
Water Table Depth (10%)
<5m = -20%, >30m = +20%, No data = +30%.
OSM Historic Context (10%)
Historic features nearby = +30%, Dense = neutral, Sparse = survey opportunity.
Temporal Consistency (10%)
Significant NDVI trend + $R^2 > 0.3$ = +30%, Change events = +5%/event.
Web Archive Evidence (5%)
Archaeological content in history = +55%, Multiple hits = +25%.