Eleven minutes, honestly estimated
Between a radar frame and a family moving the car upstairs sits a small stack of models: tracking cells, reading depths off kerbs, suppressing its own false alarms, routing around water — each trained on one council's ground and answerable to one council's threshold.
Radar in. Sentence out. Act on.
Nowcast the cell, not the state
MetMalaysia radar composites are tracked per convective cell and projected onto this council's catchments: where the rain that is falling now lands in eleven minutes, and what that nullah did the last six times it rained like this.
A photo of a kerb is a gauge
Vision models estimate water depth from crowd reports against kerbs, doorframes, parked cars and drain grates — the same measurement trick flood scientists use with reference objects, sized for a phone camera at dusk.
The bell must stay believable
Every candidate alert passes a corroboration gate: radar trend, telemetry, neighbouring sightings, historical behaviour of that exact stretch of road. False alarms are the failure mode that kills civic alert systems — suppression is a first-class model, not a threshold.
Route around the water, not the map
Evacuee and responder routing consumes live street states — flooded, gated, capacity-full — and degrades to the offline engine when towers die. The bus gets the forbidden-turn list the generic navigation app will learn about from tomorrow's news.
Each council learns its own ground
Catchment models train on one instance's history — its drains, its illegal dumps, its particular way Jalan Pasar gets wrong. No council's learning ever touches another's: the air-gap doctrine applies to gradients as well as rows.
Say it in one sentence people act on
Alert copy generation turns a probabilistic street-state forecast into 'left lane floods at the PJS 8 underpass around 5:10 — take the upper route' in Bahasa and English. An alert that needs a meteorology degree is not an alert.
How far the models are not allowed to go
Probability, published
Every nowcast ships with its confidence and its evidence mix — radar-confirmed vs crowd-hunch is a visible label, never a blended secret. The council decides what 60% means on its streets.
Thresholds belong to the signatory
Models estimate; elected officials and their engineers set the trigger levels for alerts, closures and evacuations. Vendor-set thresholds are how alert systems get ignored or sued.
Never louder than the evidence
The product refuses phrasing the data can't carry — no 'historic deluge', no certainty the cell didn't earn. Honesty under uncertainty is the property that makes people move when the bell finally rings.
Every capability here exists because a December taught Malaysia what the alert layer was missing.
Why this shape — the evidence floor→Ready to build something intelligent?
Let's engineer your next product — from idea to launch.