HOW GRIDWATCH WORKS

GridWatch reads 14 federal data sources and condenses them into one composite threat score (0–100) for your exact location — recomputed hourly, with every signal named and linked. There’s no editorializing and no engagement bait: when nothing is happening, the score says so. Here’s exactly how it’s built.

How the score is computed

1. 1

   Collect live signals

   For a location, GridWatch fetches real-time data in parallel from NWS (alerts + 7-day forecast), USGS (earthquakes), FEMA (declarations) and FEMA NRI (baseline risk), NOAA SWPC (geomagnetic storms) and NWPS (river gauges), NHC (tropical systems), EPA AirNow (air quality), NIFC (wildfires), NERC/EIA (grid stress), and PowerOutage.us (outages).

2. 2

   Weight each signal

   Every signal contributes capped points by category: weather by NWS severity, wildfires by proximity within 100 miles, earthquakes distance-weighted so far-off quakes don’t inflate a quiet region, river gauges by flood stage, and outages by the percentage of state customers without power.

3. 3

   Sum and cap at 100

   Component points are summed and capped at 100, and no single signal can exceed its category cap. The result is a deterministic 0–100 score that always shows which signals are driving it, and by how much — no black box.

4. 4

   Assign a level

   The total maps to one of four levels: NORMAL, WATCH, ELEVATED, or CRITICAL — so a glance tells you whether anything needs your attention.

5. 5

   Recompute hourly and degrade gracefully

   The score is recomputed hourly. If any feed is unavailable it drops to neutral rather than guessing — a missing signal never invents a threat, and a quiet dashboard means your area is genuinely quiet.

The 14 data sources

Every signal comes from a primary government or authoritative source. Nothing is scraped from headlines or social media for the score.

What the levels mean

How current the data is

Your personal ZIP score updates hourly. The free county pages refresh every 6 hours, and power-outage data is warmed every 6 hours across all 51 states. The daily intel brief is generated fresh each morning from the same data that feeds the score — not from headlines.

About the builder

J.G. WHITLEY

FOUNDER · PREPPER.BLOG, FIELDSCOUT & GRID WATCH

J.G. Whitley is the founder of Prepper.blog and the builder behind its tools — FieldScout, a free offline survival app, and Grid Watch, a grid-intelligence platform that monitors government feeds from CISA, FEMA, NOAA and NERC so city dwellers hear about threats before they reach their block. His focus is the intersection of urban life and grid fragility: what actually happens when the power goes out for 72 hours in a place without a garage, a generator, or a backup well — and the practical, tested steps to be ready for it.

He comes from a software and blockchain engineering background and builds a small portfolio of practical software under Amphora Codex. He writes and edits the guides and Grid Watch briefs published here, links every guide to primary sources, and recommends only products he would carry in his own kit.