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: v1.10.0
Live: phantom.labs.jamessawyer.co.uk
phantomtideis the public documentation, changelog, and release-notes repo.phantom-tideis the private application and operations repo.- Public release notes here should track the shipped release in the private repo.
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
- 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
- Radius-based proximity query for local investigative triage
- 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.
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 sar2 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
Important qualifier:
The piracy feed is current-year ICC-CCS incident reporting, not a universal global instant-notification bus. It is high-value live context, but still one source in a broader convergence model.
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 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
- reduced-motion aware map interaction
- clickable intel rows with detail-panel preservation
- geometry-aware jump targets
- "showing X of Y" transparency for intel-table limits
- plain-English space-weather status instead of NOAA jargon
- on-demand hypothesis evaluation endpoint
Known limitations:
- GUIDE still needs a stable report-id keyed row / coordinate join
- dense point rendering still depends on culling and restraint at world zoom
- convergence is now live, but several planned weight families are still missing, including AIS spoof/gap, dark-vessel, and aircraft-loiter signals
Upcoming work already identified in the roadmap:
- convergence weighting expansion and analyst-ranked queueing
- expanded SWPC ingestion for HF blackout, X-ray flux, and magnetic-field context
- AIS spoofing detection
- Open-Meteo or Copernicus marine weather upgrade
- aircraft loiter analysis
- interesting-aircraft watchlists using plane-alert-db and optional Planefence / Plane-Alert APIs
- GUIDE collector hardening
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
