A ReefBeacon alert looks simple when it arrives: a reef, a risk level, a short assessment. Behind it is a pipeline designed around one idea — a warning is only useful if the people who receive it can check where it came from.
1. The ocean updates, and so does the data
It starts far from any reef, with NOAA Coral Reef Watch publishing its daily 5-km satellite products: sea surface temperature, HotSpot and Degree Heating Weeks. ReefBeacon ingests the new data for all 65 of its stations and verifies its readings against the values NOAA publishes — the platform’s numbers are the source’s numbers, not a private reinterpretation of them.
2. Deterministic code grades the risk
For each station, the grading step is plain arithmetic on published thresholds: DHW above 4 means heat-stress alert; DHW above 8 means high bleaching risk. No model judgement and no manual intervention can move a reef between tiers. The same two levels then appear consistently in three places — email titles, in-app tags and map layers — so no one has to reconcile conflicting labels at the moment it matters.
3. Thirty minutes on the clock
When a threshold is crossed, a structured alert record is created and pushed to the conservation coordinators watching that station, by email and in-app notification, with a target of arriving within 30 minutes. Delivery is logged with receipts, so the audit trail covers not only what was sent but that it was received.
4. The alert says what it is — and what it is not
Every alert carries its raw readings, its data sources and the basis for the assessment. It also carries its limits: this is a heat-stress warning, not real-time confirmation of bleaching. Whether corals actually bleach is a question only a survey can answer — and that is exactly what the alert asks its readers to go and check.
After the alert
Alerts accumulate into the record that feeds ReefBeacon’s quarterly trend reports, and survey results that come back from the field are compared against the heat-stress history, so each season teaches the next one. If you would like your team to receive alerts for a reef you monitor, write to hello@fledged.org.