How the Radar is built
The Radar answers one commercial question: which energy and coastal-resilience developments deserve a Hampton Roads contractor's or vendor's attention this week, and what stage are they at? Everything below exists to make that answer checkable.
Implemented sources
- NOAA CO-OPS Sewells Point tide gauge: observed water levels compared to the station's officially published action and minor-flood thresholds. Both numbers come from NOAA; neither is interpolated.
- NOAA/NWS Virginia operational weather alerts, filtered for coastal-flood, storm, and wind events.
- USACE Norfolk District public RSS feed (dredging, coastal storm risk management, shoreline work).
- SAM.gov active Virginia opportunities filtered for flood, resilience, shoreline, generator, solar, microgrid, stormwater, dredging, and electrical terms.
- Virginia Beach commercial permits (public ArcGIS endpoint), filtered for energy-system and flood-protection work descriptions within a 120-day recency window.
- Curated official references: HRSD procurement, City of Norfolk flooding awareness & mitigation, and Virginia SCC case information.
Rejected or deferred sources
- FEMA OpenFEMA hazard-mitigation project data was rejected for now: the endpoint returned WAF interstitial pages instead of JSON during implementation.
- Dominion Energy's newsroom feed returned HTTP 403; no utility-announcement claims are made without it.
- Virginia DEQ public notices returned HTTP 403.
The stage board
Every qualifying signal is placed in exactly one lane by its source type: observed conditions, planned and announced work, permitted construction, open procurement, or operating references. The lane assignment is deterministic — it reflects what kind of public record the signal is, not a judgment call.
Evidence and confidence
- Every public signal carries its public source link. Confidence labels reflect how directly the source supports the reading.
- No project value, funding award, power capacity, flood-damage estimate, or contractor demand is invented. Absence is reported as absence, including empty lanes.
Update cadence
The scan runs weekly. Free and paid tiers are generated from the same run, so both always describe the same week. Each free report is dated, archived, and left unchanged.
Public/paid boundary
Public pages carry a sanitized projection: broad summaries with sources, site detail withheld. Paid-grade detail — impact and urgency ranking, vendor matching, exact site detail, and action guidance — stays in the paid report, enforced by an automated fail-closed check before anything publishes.
Limitations, honestly
- Coverage is strongest for official federal, NOAA, and municipal records; utility capital plans and private work outside the permit record are not covered.
- Structured permit coverage currently comes from Virginia Beach's open-data endpoint; other cities publish less machine-readable permit data and are not yet included.
- Signals extracted from public text can be incomplete; verify against original documents before committing resources.
- Reports are commercial screening intelligence — not legal, procurement, financial, engineering, or investment advice.