Loading brief…
1 · Detection on a SAR scene
The pipeline runs CFAR detection on a Sentinel-1 SAR scene, then asks Claude to classify each bright return. Colored boxes mark the model's verdicts.
Claude's verdicts
2 · What you're looking at — radar, not a camera
Every ship above is found in radar imagery, not a normal photo. Here's why that matters — and why a regular satellite camera would see nothing here at night.
- SAR = Synthetic Aperture Radar. The satellite sends its own microwave pulses down at the sea and listens for the echo. It makes its own "light," so it doesn't need the sun.
- A normal satellite camera is just a camera. Optical / EO sensors need daylight and clear skies. At night, or through cloud, haze, and smoke, they see nothing.
- Ships move at night — and can go "dark." Vessels can switch off their AIS transponder to avoid being tracked. That's exactly when a camera is blind, and exactly when watching the strait matters most.
- Metal ships are bright radar reflectors. Calm water bounces radar away (it looks black); a steel hull throws the signal straight back. So on SAR a ship shows up as a bright blob or streak on a near-black sea — day or night, through clouds. That's why this whole platform runs on SAR.
Same patch of sea, same night
no sunlight
nothing visible
nothing visible
SAR chip loading…
What ships look like to radar
Real vessel detections from this run — learn to spot the bright-blob signature on dark water.
3 · Traffic vs. price over time
Detected moving vessels per Sentinel-1 pass against Brent crude. Vertical markers flag timeline events (strait open / closed / incident).
No time-series data yet.
Detected moving vessels per Sentinel-1 pass (static islands/rigs filtered out) vs Brent crude. Counts are corridor detections, human-verification pending.
4 · Signals — news & market
Headlines that moved the market, aligned to detected traffic and Brent crude.
No signals loaded.