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Signet

Autonomous wildfire tracking from satellite and weather data

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I built Signet in Go to see if an autonomous system could handle the wildfire monitoring loop that people currently run by hand - checking satellite feeds, pulling up weather, looking at terrain and fuels, deciding whether a detection is actually a fire worth tracking.All the data already exists: NASA FIRMS thermal detections, GOES-19 imagery, NWS forecasts, LANDFIRE fuel models, USGS elevation, Census population data, OpenStreetMap. The problem is it arrives from different sources on different cadences in different formats.Most of the system is deterministic plumbing - ingestion, spatial indexing, deduplication. I use Gemini to orchestrate 23 tools across weather, terrain, imagery, and incident tracking for the part where clean rules break down: deciding which weak detections are worth investigating, what context to pull next, and how to synthesize noisy evidence into a structured assessment.It also records time-bounded predictions and scores them against later data, so the system is making falsifiable claims instead of narrating after the fact. The current prediction metrics are visible on the site even though the sample is still small.It's already opening incidents from raw satellite detections and matching some to official NIFC reporting. But false positives, detection latency, and incident matching can still be rough.I'd especially welcome criticism on: where should this be more deterministic instead of LLM-driven? And is this kind of autonomous monitoring actually useful, or just noisier than doing it by hand?

HN · launched Mar 15, 2026 · 123 upvotes (top 7%) · 0 views

Niche: environmental and geospatial analytics software · 124 launches, 14 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Energy & climate
  • Analytics & BI
  • B2B
  • AI feature
  • Commercial product

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Could you build this?

Partial The software orchestrates public satellite (e.g., NASA FIRMS) and weather APIs, but reliably filtering false detections and calculating autonomous fire spread dynamics requires geospatial modeling and fire physics knowledge.

What it would actually take: The system requires a backend in Go or Python that ingests multi-spectral satellite imagery (GOES, MODIS, VIIRS), joins spatial raster grids with weather forecasts (wind, humidity from NOAA), and calculates fuel dryness/topography. The challenging component is the autonomous verification algorithm that prevents high false-positive rates from industrial heat sources or sensor noise without human intervention. Expertise in remote sensing, GIS processing (GDAL), and wildfire propagation modeling is required.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: GLFF (Global Land Fire Forecasting), Prometheus fire growth model, FARSITE fire behavior model, NWS gridpoint forecasts, Canadian gov FM3 data system

Concerns raised: False positives from seasonal artifacts (snow, bare soil, cloud shadows), High latency on FIRMS data (265s p90), NWS gridpoint forecast timeouts, Weather data fetching failures not robust enough, Confusion from model-generated incident names before official naming

Feature requests: Bulk download approach instead of hitting API endpoints, SALUTE-style field reports with auto-populated grid/DTG, Match detections to official incident reporting automatically, Webhook integration for external consumers, Location-based naming ("near Colusa") until official incident name assigned

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 123 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #8 of 124 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 125 days after the earliest competitor.

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