Cross-domain maritime intelligence from open signals, not headlines
The useful signal is usually not the dot on the map. It is the gap between what is being broadcast and what the rest of the environment says is true.
Phantom Tide is a maritime and airspace intelligence platform built around that idea. It does not treat AIS, notices, weather, aircraft, or satellite detections as separate products. It evaluates them together.
The result is a working picture that answers three questions quickly:
- Where is the most interesting contradiction right now?
- Which sources agree, and which ones do not?
- How much confidence should an analyst place in that signal?
Current release: v1.27.0
Live: phantom.labs.jamessawyer.co.uk
Global overview. The point is not that many things are happening. The point is
which things should not be happening together.
Phantom Tide currently combines live and slow-moving sources across vessel tracking, aircraft activity, official advisories, environmental sensors, GPS disruption reporting, and space-weather context.
Shipped platform capabilities:
- Cross-source global map with live and reference layers in one surface
- Convergence zones computed from multi-source overlap rather than single-source alerts
- Geometry-aware rendering for points, circles, routes, and polygons
- Intel tables for SMAPS, DailyMem, NOTAM, GUIDE GPS disruptions, and GPS constellation bulletins
- NOTAM intel rows and recent cards can jump the map to airport coordinates using bundled airport reference data even when the source only exposes an airport designator
- MARAD advisory table and map layer for regional U.S. maritime threat context
- ICC-CCS piracy table and map layer for live incident monitoring
- Two-slot intel briefing queue with persistent ordering, promote controls, and compact-screen handling
- Rule-based hypotheses with evidence event IDs and confidence tiers
- Space-weather context for Kp, DST, flare, and HF risk
- GPS interference attribution using SWPC, GUIDE, NOTAM / DailyMem, and GPS advisory data together
- Ocean-state mesh and wind overlay from NDBC ship, buoy, and wave stations
- Detail panel with observation, ingest, expiry, and geometry context
- Source health reporting with explicit live, cache-backed, and failed states for slower reference collectors
- Layer toggles now mirror stale, cache-backed, and down source state directly, and map-feed caps disclose "showing X of Y" when the API limit is hit
- Reference infrastructure overlays for military, energy, datacenter, and strategic nodes such as cable landings, converter stations, and industrial chokepoints
- Static maritime reference overlays for submarine cables, vessel-routing measures, and EEZ boundaries
- Thermal anomaly alerts that pivot directly into nearby infrastructure context
- Radius-based proximity query with explicit distance ranking and nearby datacenter context for local investigative triage
- Vessel-in-zone correlation: FleetLeaks sanctioned vessels cross-referenced against TankerTrackers polygons at API serve time, with LNG/tanker alerts for Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, and Suez zones
- Convergence popup contributor breakdown showing signal family weights, event counts, and contributing event IDs for each scored grid cell
- Progressive zoom disclosure: dense real-time layers (AIS, aircraft, VIIRS) suppressed at world zoom, rendered on drill-down without a refetch
- GPS disruption events annotated with satellite visibility context using CelesTrak TLE orbital data to distinguish jamming from ionospheric interference
- NDBC DART deep-ocean pressure anomaly layer for tsunami and underwater event detection
- Aircraft fuel burn context in the OpenSky detail panel when a watchlist type-code match is available
- Onboarding, keyboard shortcuts, and clearer feedback states for refresh, collection, and briefing actions
What it does not do:
- It does not aggregate social media.
- It does not scrape news and relabel it as intelligence.
- It does not hide uncertainty behind a single composite score.
- Airport reference coordinates used for NOTAM airport fallback and airport-centred
map jumps are sourced from
mwgg/Airports. The full Phantom Tide application bundle includes the airport reference JSON used for that lookup path at runtime; this public-docs repo does not duplicate the data file. - Thanks to
mwgg/Airportsand alexander-san for their contribution and collaboration around the project and this release.
Most maritime tools are good at one of these jobs:
- show vessel positions
- show incidents
- show weather
- show advisories
Phantom Tide is built for the boundary between them.
Examples:
- A vessel broadcasts position A while satellite detection suggests position B.
- A GPS interference advisory is live, but space-weather conditions suggest a natural ionospheric explanation may be plausible.
- Traffic disappears from a corridor while warnings and weather remain active.
- Aircraft hold near a maritime disruption area while the sea picture below changes.
The platform is strongest when multiple weak signals become one strong question.
Current integrated sources:
- AIS vessel positions
- OpenSky aircraft positions
- NDBC ship and buoy observations
- NDBC wave and weather station averages
- SMAPS special advisories
- DailyMem broadcast warnings
- NOTAM airspace notices
- VIIRS night-light and thermal detections
- NOAA SWPC space-weather conditions
- USCG NAVCEN GUIDE GPS disruption reports
- MARAD MSCI maritime advisories
- ICC-CCS IMB live piracy incidents
- GPS Operational Advisory RSS bulletins
- MODU offshore drilling unit positions
- FleetLeaks sanctioned vessel positions with spoofing anomaly scores
- TankerTrackers maritime risk zone polygons (183 named zones)
- TankerTrackers seized and Iran Navy vessel registry
- NERACOOS ERDDAP oceanographic moorings
- USGS earthquake feed (M2.5+, worldwide)
- Environment Canada marine weather warnings
- NDBC DART deep-ocean pressure anomaly detection (tsunami / underwater event proxy)
- Aircraft watchlist cross-reference (ICAO registry — military, government, police, coastguard, and other tracked categories)
- AIS vessel watchlist (PLAN/CCG fleet and notable vessels)
- Military installation reference layer
- Nuclear and energy infrastructure reference layer
- Data center reference layer
- Strategic infrastructure overlay (cables, landing points, pipelines, converter stations, data-gravity nodes, energy buffers, and selected industrial chokepoints)
- EMODnet submarine cables, pipelines, and wind farm overlay
North Atlantic mid-zoom. Environmental context changes how every movement
pattern should be interpreted.
Phantom Tide is particularly useful for:
- dark-vessel and AIS-contradiction workflows
- GPS interference triage
- airspace and maritime overlap analysis
- advisory-heavy regional monitoring
- identifying when multiple public signals start telling the same story
It is less useful if the task is only "show me this ship" or "show me the latest headlines."
Risk zones are computed from cross-source convergence. A serious zone should
exist because independent signals overlap, not because a designer drew it.
Wave and wind context from sparse sensor networks, rendered as a continuous
field for operational reading rather than a pile of isolated station markers.
Detail view keeps the source, geometry, and time semantics visible. A map pin
without provenance is decoration.
Right-click any position to rank nearby activity with explicit distance and
datacenter context across source types. Useful for drilling into a corridor,
port approach, or disruption cell.
Structured analyst tables keep high-value sources readable and jump the map to
the relevant area without forcing a layer hunt.
Analyst-facing features available now:
- layer toggles with per-layer counts
- layer toggles with stale/cache/down badges
- reduced-motion aware map interaction
- clickable intel rows with detail-panel preservation
- geometry-aware jump targets
- "showing X of Y" transparency for intel-table and capped map/API layer limits
- proximity-query tables with explicit distance-ranked event and datacenter rows
- plain-English space-weather status instead of NOAA jargon
- on-demand hypothesis evaluation endpoint
Known limitations:
- Dense point rendering depends on culling and restraint at world zoom
- Convergence scoring is live but several weight families are still in development, including AIS spoof/gap, dark-vessel, and aircraft-loiter signals
Upcoming work already identified in the roadmap:
- CelesTrak GPS TLE enrichment (visible satellite count at disruption events, to distinguish jamming from ionospheric interference)
- Open-Meteo marine weather mesh upgrade (full ocean grid at 1/4° resolution)
- NWS active marine alert polygons (U.S. coastal zone context)
- AviationWeather METAR and SIGMET collectors (weather at ports and naval bases, volcanic ash and tropical cyclone polygons)
- NDBC DART buoy anomaly detection (tsunami and underwater explosion proxy)
- Convergence contributor breakdown — drill into a scored cell to see the evidence events that drove the score
- Vessel watchlist alert table in intel panel
- DMI Arctic ice chart overlay and INCOIS Indian Ocean high-wave alerts
These are planned items, not implied capabilities.
Phantom Tide is not publicly open at the moment.
If you have a concrete use case, open an access request issue or contact directly with enough context to explain why the platform is relevant.
This repository is the public interface for feedback. The application code itself is not published here.
| Report a bug | Something is broken or behaving unexpectedly |
| Request a feature | A concrete capability the platform should add |
| General feedback | Workflow notes, questions, or review comments |
| All open issues | Existing public feedback |
See CHANGELOG.md.
Phantom Tide - JS Labs © 2026 James Sawyer