Nicheloom

Market intelligence for builders — see what's gaining traction before it's crowded.

Submarius

Global water clarity for divers

Details

External ID
48614062
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Submarius
Website domain
submarius.com
Launched
June 20, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
14
Upvotes percentile
0.6885245901639344
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Submarius started as just a dashboard for diving conditions, but I quickly realized that there is simply no API for water clarity, nor even a simple way to calculate it. Divers call it viz, and it is one of the most consequential factors for a diving experience. So I dove the viz rabbit-hole. I landed on a state-augmented ensemble kalman filter. More details on the /clarity page. My question for the HN audience is if anyone knows of a better way of doing this? There is a ton of satellite data to train on, but a lot of it is messy (clouds read as turbid water, shallow reefs reflect abnormally causing bad readings, etc). Appreciate any feedback on the subject. Enjoy the read!

Enrichment

Theme
interactive simulations and creative experiments
Vertical
Travel & hospitality
Function
Analytics & BI
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
water clarity maps for divers
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Accurately forecasting underwater visibility worldwide requires complex oceanographic modeling, satellite radiometry data processing, and calibration against marine sensor networks.

What it would actually take: The system requires high-throughput GIS/remote-sensing pipelines ingesting petabytes of multi-spectral satellite data (Copernicus Sentinel-3, MODIS/Aqua for Kd490 diffuse attenuation coefficients) fused with NOAA hydrodynamic, tidal, and river discharge models. The hard part is physical modeling: converting satellite water surface reflectance into real-time horizontal Secchi-depth/diver visibility across coastal zones subject to turbidity, wave resuspension, and plankton blooms. This requires specialized oceanographers, remote sensing data engineers, and heavy spatial computing infrastructure.

Discussion

6 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Existing dashboards for water activities (sailing, rowing)

Concerns raised: Unclear messaging about whether it covers multiple activities or is activity-specific, Sharing functionality is difficult to discover and use, URL structure doesn't support easy deep linking for specific locations

Feature requests: Deep links with location format like `/diving/location/{lat},{lng}`, Easier sharing mechanism for location-specific conditions

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 32 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #16 of 33 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 210 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.