Tony Bendele Space Weather

Help Build It. Help Keep It Running.

Community support helps build, strengthen, and operate the public space weather systems behind the alerts, webcams, dashboards, and live data. The community goals shown here represent approximately half of the projected costs. I personally cover the remaining share.

Shared Funding Model

Approximately 50% community funded and 50% personally funded.

The crowdfunding targets on this page are not the full cost of the project. They represent the approximate portion I am asking supporters to help cover. I continue funding the remaining projected infrastructure, development, equipment, hosting, processing, storage, and operating expenses myself.

Approx. 50 / 50

Current Funding Priority

October 2026 Operations Fund

Current contributions are first applied here to cover the community funded share of the recurring costs required to keep the public system running.

Monthly Operations

Ways to Support

Choose any payment method.

Unless you specify otherwise, contributions are applied in the published priority order.

Cash App PayPal Venmo
Want your contribution applied to a specific goal? Include Monthly, Goal 1, or Goal 2 in the payment note. Otherwise it will be applied using the default priority order.

How Contributions Are Applied

Keep it running first. Then strengthen it. Then expand it.

1
Monthly Operations

Cover the current community monthly goal so the existing public system can keep operating.

→
2
Goal 1: Critical Infrastructure

Finish the community funded share of the immediate upgrades needed for reliability, capacity, and proper operation.

→
3
Goal 2: Expansion & Resilience

Support the community funded share of new regions, alert systems, intelligence, and future capabilities.

Goal 1

Critical Infrastructure Fund

Finish, harden, and properly equip the systems already operating today. Completed items remain visible so supporters can see what this phase has already produced.

71%
$1,420
Community contributions received
$580 remaining in community share
$2,000
community funding goal
Approx. projected total cost ~$4,000
Community share $2,000
My projected share ~$2,000
The community goal represents approximately half of the projected cost for this phase. I am personally covering the remaining projected share.
22 of 27 listed roadmap items completed
Core Public Systems 6/6 completed
Rebuild and substantially expand the Live Space Weather & Aurora Data page
Completed
Build and launch the automated North America substorm detection system
Completed
Launch the public North America Aurora Operations Dashboard
Completed
Expand the North America monitoring network to more than 60 public camera sources
Completed
Launch public desktop and mobile push notifications for space weather alerts
Completed
Create a read only active event history feed for recent alerts and evidence
Completed
Detection & Event Logic 8/8 completed
Build independent regional monitoring for Alaska, Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern North America
Completed
Add multi station magnetometer corroboration for regional substorm confirmation
Completed
Add rapid onset detection using multiple short term magnetic change windows
Completed
Add regional rearm and duplicate alert suppression for intense or long lasting events
Completed
Add partial data handling so unavailable stations do not automatically invalidate otherwise strong evidence
Completed
Add camera and magnetometer visual correlation so alerts can include supporting optical evidence
Completed
Add basic automated solar wind threshold alerts for Bz, speed, density, and extended southward Bz
Completed
Build and validate the initial GOES solar flare detector using primary and secondary satellite data
Completed
Camera Intelligence 5/5 completed
Add camera health and freshness monitoring with LIVE, STALE, and OFFLINE states
Completed
Add night, twilight, and daylight awareness so camera evidence is interpreted appropriately
Completed
Add dynamic camera ranking using region, distance, darkness, freshness, orientation, and relevance
Completed
Highlight the strongest regional magnetic evidence and the most relevant available camera during active events
Completed
Increase priority camera analysis cadence, including 15 second Yellowknife analysis during nighttime windows
Completed
Infrastructure & Reliability 3/8 completed
Move higher volume webcam and alert processing onto paid infrastructure with greater capacity
Completed
Deploy dedicated databases and object storage for alerts, subscriptions, imagery, analysis records, event state, and settings
Completed
Harden public alerts for iPhone Safari PWA and Android Chrome
Completed
Update alert event links so they use the new Operations Dashboard and current evidence routing instead of the retired SmugMug camera flow
Planned
Further harden source outage and partial coverage handling during active events
Planned
Increase backup, storage, and recovery capacity as operational data grows
Planned
Complete required computer and hardware upgrades used to develop, monitor, and maintain the system
Planned
Reduce remaining latency bottlenecks between upstream data, analysis, dashboard updates, and public alerts
Planned
Goal 2

Expansion & Resilience Fund

Build the next generation of the project with new continents, new alert systems, deeper automation, stronger resilience, and more advanced public tools.

0%
$0
Community contributions received
$2,500 remaining in community share
$2,500
community funding goal
Approx. projected total cost ~$5,000
Community share $2,500
My projected share ~$2,500
The community goal represents approximately half of the projected cost for this phase. I am personally covering the remaining projected share.
0 of 35 listed roadmap items completed
Geographic Expansion 0/4 completed
Build a Europe Operations Network with aurora cameras, magnetometers, regional detection, visual evidence, and a dedicated dashboard
Planned
Build a third continent scale monitoring and alert network after Europe
Planned
Expand aurora camera coverage into additional underserved and lower latitude areas
Planned
Create a repeatable regional architecture so future continents can be added without rebuilding the system from scratch
Planned
Future Alert Systems 0/12 completed
Launch a full public Solar Flare Alert System with automatic flare class, start, peak, escalation, charts, event pages, and push notifications
Planned
Build automatic Geomagnetic Storm alerts for G1 through G5 conditions
Planned
Integrate geomagnetic storm watches, warnings, and observed storm condition alerts
Planned
Build automatic Solar Radiation Storm alerts for S1 through S5 conditions
Planned
Build automatic Radio Blackout alerts for R1 through R5 conditions
Planned
Integrate official NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center watches, warnings, and alerts into the public system
Planned
Detect CME or interplanetary shock arrival using sudden solar wind, density, pressure, and magnetic field changes
Planned
Add Sudden Storm Commencement detection and notification
Planned
Detect high speed solar wind stream and coronal hole stream arrivals
Planned
Expand existing solar wind alerts into a fuller severity and escalation system
Planned
Add de escalation and all clear notifications when significant conditions end
Planned
Add subscriber controls for regions, alert types, and minimum severity levels
Planned
Aurora Intelligence 0/7 completed
Add cloud intelligence so obscured cameras are identified and ranked appropriately
Planned
Develop advanced optical aurora confirmation that goes beyond simple frame change detection
Planned
Improve false positive suppression for headlights, exposure changes, snow, clouds, moonlight, and other misleading visual changes
Planned
Build a north to south activity ladder showing confirmed aurora progression toward lower latitudes
Planned
Build an interactive live network map showing cameras, magnetometers, active regions, outages, nighttime coverage, and where activity is occurring
Planned
Add automated low latitude expansion alerts when aurora is confirmed progressively farther south
Planned
Correlate events across continents instead of treating each regional network as an isolated system
Planned
Resilience, History & Analysis 0/12 completed
Add automatic failover between critical data sources when a primary source becomes unavailable
Planned
Create source quality scoring based on freshness, reliability, completeness, and recent performance
Planned
Build a public system health and status dashboard for cameras, data feeds, alerts, databases, and other major components
Planned
Add automated administrator outage notifications for critical data sources and internal services
Planned
Create permanent event pages and a long term searchable archive of significant space weather events
Planned
Build event replay tools that reconstruct how magnetic, solar wind, camera, and alert evidence evolved through an event
Planned
Build a historical backtesting system so detector changes can be tested against past events before public deployment
Planned
Track performance statistics such as alert timing, misses, false alarms, delivery success, camera availability, source availability, and system uptime
Planned
Create a unified Space Weather Operations Dashboard combining solar, solar wind, geomagnetic, aurora, radiation, blackout, camera, and alert information
Planned
Build a Space Weather Event Engine that connects related flare, blackout, CME, solar wind, geomagnetic storm, substorm, and aurora developments into one evolving event
Planned
Develop a public API for selected alert, event, camera health, and system status information
Planned
Build a secure administrative control center for managing alert systems, camera networks, data source health, regional settings, subscriber options, event status, system configuration, and future alert products from one place
Planned
Goal 3

October 2026 Operations Fund

Cover the recurring expenses required to keep the entire public system operating every month after it has been built.

0%
$0
Community contributions received
$300 remaining in community share
$300 / month
community funding goal
Approx. projected total cost ~$600 / month
Community share $300 / month
My projected share ~$300 / month
The community goal represents approximately half of the projected cost for this monthly operating period. I am personally covering the remaining projected share.
17 recurring operating categories
Cloud & Processing 5 ongoing
Cloudflare image transformations and continuous webcam image processing
Ongoing
Worker execution, scheduled jobs, automated detectors, APIs, and background processing
Ongoing
D1 database reads, writes, storage, and operational database usage
Ongoing
R2 object storage and operations for camera frames, analysis imagery, event evidence, and records
Ongoing
Higher usage during major aurora or space weather events, including traffic and processing spikes
Ongoing
Websites & Public Delivery 3 ongoing
Website platform and hosting expenses used by the public space weather project
Ongoing
Domain registrations and renewals for the project and its public services
Ongoing
Delivery of live dashboards, alert pages, event pages, funding information, and other public resources
Ongoing
Monitoring & Alerts 5 ongoing
Recurring processing for the North America webcam network
Ongoing
Recurring processing for future Europe and additional continental camera networks after they launch
Ongoing
Continuous magnetometer, solar wind, GOES, proton, and other scientific data retrieval and processing
Ongoing
Public push notification and alert delivery infrastructure
Ongoing
Continuous camera freshness, source availability, and automated system health checks
Ongoing
Storage, Resilience & Growth 4 ongoing
Growing storage requirements as more cameras, continents, alerts, and permanent event records are added
Ongoing
Recurring backup, redundancy, monitoring, and recovery services
Ongoing
Paid APIs, data services, licensing, or monitoring services added specifically to operate the public system
Ongoing
Dedicated connectivity or service upgrades directly required to reliably operate the public system
Ongoing
Important: Goal 2 pays to build future systems such as Europe. Goal 3 pays the recurring image processing, computing, storage, hosting, data, and alert costs required to operate those systems after they launch.

Funding Transparency

What the three goals mean

These are community targets

The displayed goals represent approximately half of the projected cost. I personally cover the remaining share.

Monthly comes first

Undesignated contributions first cover the current community Monthly Operations goal.

Goal 1 comes next

After the month is covered, undesignated contributions support the community share of Critical Infrastructure until that goal is complete.

Goal 2 follows

After Goal 1 is complete, undesignated contributions support the community share of Expansion & Resilience.

Donor designations are respected

A contributor can direct a donation to Monthly, Goal 1, or Goal 2 by identifying that fund in the payment note.

No intentional double counting

Goals 1 and 2 pay to build or upgrade a system. Goal 3 pays the recurring costs of operating it after it exists.

Completed work stays visible

Finished roadmap items remain listed with a strikethrough and Completed label so supporters can see what funding has already helped accomplish.

The split is approximate

Actual expenses can vary as usage, equipment, infrastructure, and development needs change. The 50/50 model is a projected funding split, not an exact accounting division.