How Alerts Work — YANA-IGY

Step 1 — Disaster Detection

YANA-IGY continuously monitors publicly available government data sources around the clock. These include real-time feeds from agencies such as:

USGS — earthquake and seismic activity data
NOAA / National Weather Service — severe weather watches, warnings, and advisories
NASA — satellite-based fire detection
NOAA buoy networks — ocean conditions and coastal monitoring
USGS water resources — river gauges and flood stage levels

When any of these sources reports a potential threat, YANA-IGY's analysis systems evaluate the data to determine whether an alert should be issued.

How Targeting Actually Works — Polygon Geofencing

YANA-IGY does not send alerts based on guesswork or broad regions. The targeting decision is driven by polygon-based geofencing against the official NWS warning shape, supported by additional ground-truth and motion data.

Primary trigger — Official NWS warning polygons

When the National Weather Service issues a Tornado Warning, Flash Flood Warning, or similar, they publish a precise GeoJSON polygon describing the affected area. YANA-IGY polls the live feed at api.weather.gov/alerts/active and pulls those polygons in real time. If a subscriber's saved coordinates fall inside an active polygon, that subscriber is alerted — the rest of the county is not.

Supporting layers

SPC reports — ground-truth confirmation of tornadoes, hail, and wind damage.
NEXRAD radar — storm motion, rotation, and intensity.
USGS gauges — live river stages for flood verification.
Position vs. storm — bearing, distance, ETA, and convergence score relative to the subscriber.

How a subscriber gets matched

At signup, a resident provides their county (FIPS) and optionally their exact location via the "Use My Location" button (or a manual lat/lon).
The polygon scanner pulls every active NWS warning polygon from the live feed.
For each polygon, every opted-in subscriber's coordinates are tested with a point-in-polygon ray cast (with a bounding-box pre-filter for speed).
If a subscriber falls inside the polygon, an alert is queued. If a subscriber didn't share coordinates, they fall back to county-level matching so they aren't silently excluded.
A safety window (10 min for tornado, 25 min for flash flood, etc.) is selected from the event type and the convergence score.
The alert is delivered via SMS (Twilio), email (alerts@yana-igy.com), and pushed to the Command Center / app, with Ripple Mesh as the fallback when towers are down.

Smart filtering — no spam

Only events meeting the broadcast threshold — SEVERE or EXTREME threat tier, or any "hard warning" (Tornado, Flash Flood, Tsunami, Hurricane) — are sent.
A convergence score (0.0–1.0) blends NWS severity, certainty, and urgency to set the urgency tier.
Each NWS alert ID is fired at most once (idempotency record in the nws-polygon-fired store) so a polygon update never re-spams subscribers.
Strict opt-in only — no alert is ever sent to a phone number that didn't subscribe.

      Real example.
      The Flash Flood Warnings issued for parts of Illinois (Montgomery, Macoupin, …) trigger alerts only for
      subscribers whose saved coordinates fell inside those specific NWS polygons — not the entire state, and
      not the entire county.
    

Step 2 — Threat Analysis

Raw data from government feeds doesn't automatically become an alert. YANA-IGY applies multi-factor analysis to assess each potential threat across several dimensions:

Location & proximity — Where is the threat relative to subscribed counties?
Timing & speed — How quickly could the threat reach affected areas?
Severity assessment — Does the event meet the threshold to warrant an alert?
Secondary hazards — Could this event trigger cascading dangers (e.g., earthquake causing tsunami)?

Only events that meet YANA-IGY's alert criteria are advanced to the verification stage. This process is designed to minimize false alarms while maximizing early warning time.

Step 3 — Alert Verification

Before any alert reaches a resident, it must pass through multiple independent verification checks:

      Encryption & integrity —
      Every alert payload is encrypted and digitally signed to prevent tampering. If the signature doesn't match, the alert is rejected.
    

      Confidence scoring —
      Alerts must meet a minimum confidence threshold before they are approved for delivery. This gate prevents uncertain or low-quality data from generating false alerts.
    

      Compliance review —
      All outgoing messages are checked to ensure they comply with federal regulations (TCPA and FCC).
      YANA-IGY alerts contain only a directive to move to safety — never guidance, instructions, or advice.
    

All verification layers must pass before an alert is released. If any check fails, the alert is held.

Iterative Holographic Verification

YANA-IGY employs an iterative build-up and tear-down process for every alert. A holographic representation of the alert data is constructed and then deconstructed — verifying every element against a strict binary TRUE / FALSE gate. If the gate identifies weaknesses or discrepancies, an adaptive patching layer fills the gap and the alert is re-verified from scratch. This cycle repeats as many times as necessary until the alert is confirmed TRUE or definitively rejected. Only alerts that achieve a verified TRUE status are released for delivery via alerts@yana-igy.com and SMS.

Step 4 — Alert Delivery to Residents

Verified alerts are delivered to opted-in county residents through a multi-channel system designed to work even when infrastructure fails:

Primary: SMS Alerts

YANA-IGY sends SMS text messages to all subscribers in the NWS polygon only,the affected area. The rest of county residents that are not in a polygon effected area are not disturbed. Messages follow a strict format:

      Threat level • Hazard type • Direction • ETA • Safety window • Move directive
    

Messages are short, clear, and actionable. They tell you what is coming and when — the decision to move is always yours.

Email Alerts

Subscribers who provide an email address also receive a formatted alert email from alerts@yana-igy.com. Email alerts contain the same information as SMS — hazard type, severity, safety window, and move directive — delivered in parallel so you receive the alert through multiple channels simultaneously.

Fallback: Mesh Relay

When cell towers go down during a disaster, YANA-IGY's Ripple Mesh Relay takes over. Opted-in phones broadcast the alert to nearby devices using Bluetooth Low Energy and Wi-Fi — no cell signal required. Each phone passes the alert to the next, spreading outward like ripples in a pond. The moment any phone in the chain regains connectivity, all collected alerts are uploaded and delivered.

No personal data is shared through the mesh — only encrypted alert data (message, timestamp, and general location).

Accessibility

YANA-IGY includes Vibe Text / Dual-Sense accessibility features for residents who are blind or have low vision. Alerts can be delivered as vibrating Braille patterns, spoken audio, or both simultaneously. Subscribers can enable this feature and choose their preferred mode at any time.

What YANA-IGY Does NOT Do

YANA-IGY does not replace government emergency systems (WEA, EAS, AMBER).
YANA-IGY does not provide guidance, instructions, or evacuation routes — only alert-to-move directives.
YANA-IGY does not share, sell, or expose personal data. Phone numbers and email addresses are used solely for alert delivery.
YANA-IGY does not use sirens or external hardware — it is entirely a digital SMS, email, and mesh-based system.

How YANA-IGY Propagates Alerts