Groundstation

Earth data, agent-ready. A Development Seed labs prototype that puts the cloud-native geospatial stack in the hands of AI agents — and of anyone with a browser.

Ask a question about any place on Earth. groundstation finds the freshest satellite imagery, active fires and disaster alerts, and the weather, does the pixel math, and hands back an interactive map — through whichever door fits:

flowchart LR
    A["🗣 You, via Claude<br/>(MCP server + skill)"] --> T
    B["🖥 Web console<br/>(no terminal needed)"] --> T
    C["⏰ Scheduled briefings<br/>(nobody asks)"] --> T
    T["groundstation tools"] --> D["STAC catalogs<br/>Earth Search · NASA VEDA<br/>Planetary Computer"]
    T --> E["TiTiler<br/>tiles · previews · band math"]
    T --> F["EONET · GDACS · Open-Meteo<br/>events & weather"]
    T --> G["🗺 shareable map artifacts<br/>📄 decision-ready briefs"]

Everything runs against public, keyless endpoints — it demos anywhere, with nothing to sign up for.

Real examples (all real runs, real data)

"What's burning near Chelan County?" — one scan found the two active wildfires (Navarre Coulee, Chelan Hills), correlated them with 14 straight days of zero rain and a 33°C heat peak in the forecast, and pointed at the three sub-1%-cloud scenes from ignition day.

"How did vegetation change around Wenatchee?" — one compare_dates call matched two scenes from the same Sentinel-2 tile (10TFT, both ~1% cloud) and answered: NDVI 0.46 → 0.63 between May 28 and July 5, a +36% spring green-up, with a swipe map to see it.

"Watch these four places every morning." — the fleet sweep triaged Chelan ACT (fires + heat), Efate and Laredo WATCH, Barotse CALM ("NDVI 0.397 → 0.395, normal dry-season drift, not a distress signal"). On its second run the Chelan brief opened with "unchanged since this morning's earlier run" — it remembers yesterday and only makes noise about what's new.

Quickstart

As a Claude Code plugin (easiest — brings the MCP server and the earth-data skill together; requires uv):

/plugin marketplace add dannybauman/groundstation
/plugin install groundstation@groundstation

As an MCP server directly:

git clone https://github.com/dannybauman/groundstation && cd groundstation && uv sync
claude mcp add groundstation -- uv --directory "$PWD" run groundstation

The web console:

uv run --group web groundstation-web   # open http://127.0.0.1:8765

A brief, or the morning sweep:

uv run briefing/brief.py --place "Chelan County, Washington" --days 10
uv run briefing/brief.py --fleet briefing/fleet.json                  # + --slack-webhook <url> to deliver

Things to ask it

• "Find the clearest Sentinel-2 scene of Lake Chelan from the past two weeks, tell me what's burning nearby, and give me a map I can share."
• "How much surface water is on the Barotse Floodplain right now vs early March? Use NDWI, give me numbers and a swipe map."
• "What does NASA VEDA have on the Caldor fire? Put the burn severity layer over a current scene."
• "Show the newest NAIP aerial imagery of Des Plaines, Illinois with ESA WorldCover land cover as a toggle layer."
• "Any active flood alerts along the Rio Grande between El Paso and Laredo? Alerts, week-ahead rain, latest usable imagery, one map."
• "Compare vegetation in the Yirgacheffe coffee region between January and now, and tell me which scenes you'd trust."
• "Brief me on Efate, Vanuatu: open alerts, the week ahead, the most recent cloud-free scene, all on a map."

First search_datasets call takes ~20–30s while collection lists cache; everything after is instant.

What an agent gets

Tool	What it does	Backed by
geocode / reverse_geocode	place name ↔ coordinates + bbox, retries descriptive phrases	Gazet (when its JSON API lands), Nominatim
list_catalogs / search_datasets / describe_collection	find the right data across catalogs	Earth Search, NASA VEDA, Planetary Computer
search_imagery	recent items, cloud filtering, place names accepted	STAC APIs
preview_item / tile_url_template	browser-openable previews and XYZ tiles	titiler.xyz, VEDA raster API, PC data API
compute_statistics	band math over an item — NDVI is (nir-red)/(nir+red)	TiTiler statistics
compare_dates	"what changed?" in one call: same-tile scenes, index delta, swipe map	all of the above
render_map	self-contained interactive HTML maps; two rasters → automatic swipe compare	MapLibre + live tiles
active_events / weather_summary	open fires/floods/storms + past & coming week	NASA EONET, GDACS, Open-Meteo

The paired skill in skills/earth-data/ carries the judgment layer: which catalog for what, asset conventions, index-layer recipes, "always end spatial answers with a map."

Earth briefs you

The briefing engine inverts the interaction — instead of you asking the right question, Earth reports in: fresh scenes, events, weather, an NDVI change signal against last month, a CALM/WATCH/ACT alert level, and suggested next steps, as a shareable HTML page. It keeps per-AOI memory so "what changed" means changed since the last run, fleet mode writes a triaged morning-sweep index, and --slack-webhook delivers the summary where people already look. Cron it and it runs while nobody's watching.

Be a good neighbor: titiler.xyz

All tiling, previews, and pixel math ride titiler.xyz by default — a free, shared community endpoint that Development Seed runs as a demo. It rate-limits (HTTP 429) under heavy use, and a day of agent runs or a room full of people scanning places can hit that. Built-in mitigations: map artifacts carry scene footprint bounds so browsers never request out-of-footprint tiles, and statistics use small max_size reads.

When to use your own tiler — fleet briefings on a schedule, field-test-style batch runs, live demos to an audience, anything sustained:

docker compose up -d titiler                          # TiTiler is DevSeed OSS — one container (see compose.yml)
export GROUNDSTATION_TITILER=http://localhost:8000    # everything routes there

Any TiTiler deployment with the /stac router works (a hosted one, eoAPI's raster service, your own cloud instance). titiler.xyz is for kicking the tires; your own endpoint is for real work.

One caveat we learned in the field: some Earth Search collections (NAIP, Landsat) sit in requester-pays buckets. titiler.xyz carries AWS credentials for those; a local TiTiler returns 500s on them unless you provide your own AWS credentials (see compose.yml) — or just use Planetary Computer's copies of those datasets.

Reliability

Three layers of checks, because a generative product without evals is a demo, not a tool:

• uv run evals/unit_checks.py — offline, deterministic; runs in CI on every push
• uv run evals/run_evals.py — 10 live checks against the real endpoints (on-demand + weekly CI)
• uv run evals/brief_checks.py — grounding checks on generated briefs: required sections, alert level, dates cited, and every claimed event must exist in the input data (hallucination guard)

More

• docs/examples.md — the field test: twenty example prompts actually run through the agent, graded, with the improvements each round produced; visual walkthrough at /docs/field-test.html when the console is running
• docs/architecture.md — how it all fits together, design decisions, and what's deliberately not built
• Deep exploration hands off to stac-map (Pete Gadomski), which renders COGs client-side via deck.gl-raster (Kyle Barron); tiling and pixel math ride TiTiler
• A Development Seed labs prototype, July 2026