Methodology & AI Limitations

Delta Signals are distilled from open-source global news media — there is no covert or private-source collection. The pipeline is automated and runs continuously:

1. Ingest — worldwide reported events are pulled from open news-event data on a rolling basis.
2. AI enrichment — each event is classified (category, escalation trend), given a severity and a GEOINT-relevance score, and assessed for whether a satellite could observe a physical mark, with a recommended sensor and collection window.
3. Geolocation — the event is resolved to coordinates and a country, corrected from the raw feed where possible so the mapped point matches the described location.
4. Source-linking — every signal keeps links to the original reporting so the evidence is one click away.

The Daily World Brief and the Delta Agent analyst are produced on top of this same corpus.

Each signal carries several distinct scores — they measure different things and should not be collapsed into one number:

• Event Severity (0–10) — how serious the event is in human/impact terms. A high-severity event is not necessarily observable from space.
• GEOINT Relevance (0–10) — how useful the event is for geospatial/satellite analysis. This is deliberately separate from severity: a moderate-severity infrastructure strike can be highly GEOINT-relevant, while a high-severity diplomatic event may not be.
• Satellite Observability — observable or not-observable: whether the event leaves a physical mark a satellite could image at all.
• Geolocation Confidence — whether the mapped point was geo-checked and is consistent with the resolved country. Low-confidence fixes are flagged (API field geo_verified) so you can treat them as approximate.
• Source Confidence — how well-corroborated the event is (number of independent sources and mentions).
• Expected Information Gain (0–1) — how much a satellite look could reduce uncertainty, used to prioritize what is worth imaging.

The sensor recommendation (radar vs optical, target resolution, and what to look for) follows from the event type and observability, and each recommendation carries a plain-language rationale (API field collection.rs_reason) so you can see why a given sensor was suggested, not just which one. Ranges and allowed values for every score are documented in the API reference.

AI (large language models) is used in three places:

• Signal enrichment — category, severity, GEOINT relevance, escalation trend, geolocation correction, and satellite-collection recommendations.
• The Daily World Brief — a synthesized narrative over the day's signals, produced under quality checks (see below).
• Delta Agent — an agentic analyst that reasons over the corpus and returns a sourced brief.

Enrichment is grounded in the source reporting rather than the model's own memory, which reduces (but does not eliminate) fabrication. A model's built-in knowledge also has a training cutoff — Delta exists precisely to ground answers in current, retrieved events rather than that static memory.

By default, no. Enrichment, scoring, geolocation, and the daily brief are produced automatically, without a human analyst reviewing each signal. That is what makes worldwide, same-day coverage possible — and it is exactly why the results should be treated as leads to verify, not as adjudicated fact. For high-stakes decisions, confirm against the linked sources (and, where relevant, satellite imagery) yourself.

• False positives / noise — an event may be mis-categorized, over- or under-rated on severity, or duplicated across reports.
• Mislocation — geolocation can resolve to the wrong place, especially for same-name locations; a signal may carry a lower geolocation confidence or land at country granularity only.
• Source-dependent — coverage and framing inherit the biases and gaps of the underlying news reporting; absence of a signal is not evidence that nothing happened.
• AI error — scores and summaries are model estimates and can be wrong; the source links are the ground truth, not the generated text.
• Observability is a recommendation — the satellite-collection suggestion is an assessment of what could be imaged, not a guarantee of a usable image (weather, revisit, and licensing still apply).
• Market tags are informational — any market-impact tag is context, not investment advice.

Scores and enrichment are validated against allowed ranges and value sets, and the Daily World Brief passes a deterministic quality gate before publishing: a truncated or structurally-incomplete brief is held back and the previous good brief keeps serving, rather than publishing a half-finished one. You can check current data freshness and pipeline status at any time via the API (GET /api/v1/status) or the MCP status://current resource.

Every signal links to its original reporting; when you export or republish, keep those attributions. Satellite imagery shown or searched in Off-Nadir Delta comes from open programs (e.g. Copernicus Sentinel-1/2), which are free to use with attribution to the providing agency. Follow each provider's attribution and licensing terms when you redistribute derived imagery or products.

Use Delta to find, prioritize, and orient — what is happening, where it is concentrating, and what to look at next — then verify the specifics against the linked sources before acting. Do not treat a single signal, score, or generated summary as confirmed fact, and do not use the service for unlawful surveillance or targeting of individuals.