what caelus does

There is a gap between what satellites can measure and what anyone is acting on.

A satellite passes over a colonia in South Texas and records flood extent. No gauge on the ground records it. No agency writes it down. The next time water comes through, nobody upstream knew it was likely.

That gap, between measurement and response, is what Caelus works on.

the method

Four steps.

Detect

We continuously ingest open satellite and government data: Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar for surface and structural change, NASA GRACE-FO for groundwater storage anomalies, NASA FIRMS for active fire and smoke, USGS streamflow, FEMA flood mapping, EPA environmental justice screening, Census demographic data, CDC health measures, and FCC broadband coverage.

The question we ask of that data is narrow: where do the physical signals indicate need, and the response records indicate nobody is watching? That divergence, measured need against absent response, is what we look for.

It is not the same as where are conditions worst. It is where is the mismatch largest.

Document

Every detection becomes a brief. A brief is a plain document.

Briefs are written to be handed to a person doing the work. Not a pitch, not a proposal. If a community organization cannot read it and immediately see whether it is useful, it is not finished.

The uncertainty section is not optional. Remote sensing infers; it does not observe directly. A brief that hides its error bars is worse than no brief.

What the data shows, with the source and date of every layer
Where, at the finest resolution the data honestly supports
Who is affected, from public demographic data
What the uncertainty is, and what the data cannot tell you
What a response could look like, at a technical level

Deliver

Briefs go directly to the people already embedded in a region: community organizations, regional researchers, practitioners, and agencies working the problem on the ground.

This is the part that distinguishes Caelus. We are not building an audience and waiting for the right person to find us. We identify who is already doing the work in a place, and we bring them what we found.

Where they tell us the data is wrong, we correct it. Ground truth from someone who lives there outranks our inference every time.

Open

Every brief is also opened publicly, so that anyone who wants to build a response can. Students, researchers, engineers, and organizations can claim a brief and build against it.

Caelus does not take equity, does not own what you build, and does not require an application to start reading.

honesty

What Caelus is not.

This section builds more trust than any credential, so it stays on the page even when it is unflattering.

We are not a substitute for people on the ground.

Satellite data infers conditions; it does not replace someone who lives in a place and knows what happened there.

We are not an agency.

We do not issue warnings or official guidance. Our briefs are research artifacts meant to inform people who do that work.

We are not a general accelerator.

We do not fund ideas that arrive looking for a problem. The problem comes first.

We are early.

Caelus was founded in 2025. Much of what is described here is in active build, and we mark it as such rather than implying scale we do not have.

Explore Delos See where we work