TremorWatch Methodology
How TremorWatch turns public signals into supply chain risk intelligence.
What TremorWatch monitors
TremorWatch watches open risk signals across natural hazards, conflict and unrest, disease notices, commodity context, logistics chokepoints, and high-volume news streams. The goal is not to publish every event. The goal is to identify public signals that may deserve review by supply-chain, procurement, logistics, and risk teams. A signal becomes useful only when it can be connected to a plausible operating mechanism such as transport access, port capacity, supplier geography, labor availability, energy reliability, or commodity exposure.
The system is designed for early awareness. Public sources often surface weak evidence before a company receives a formal supplier notice. That early signal can help teams decide where to look, but it should not be treated as a final answer. TremorWatch therefore separates collection, normalization, scoring, and editorial framing so the public blog does not become a stream of unsupported event pages.
Collection and normalization
The methodology begins with collection and normalization. Incoming signals are mapped to event categories, approximate geography, time, source type, and severity indicators. When a source provides structured metadata, TremorWatch preserves it. When a source is less structured, the platform extracts only the fields that can support a cautious supply-chain review. Ambiguous or low-quality signals are not promoted simply because they mention a region or a commodity.
Normalization matters because different sources describe risk differently. A disaster feed, a news article, and an event dataset may refer to the same situation with different names, timestamps, and location precision. TremorWatch groups and reviews these signals so teams can see patterns rather than chase duplicates. The weekly blog format is one output of that process.
Risk scoring principles
The risk score is a triage signal, not a prediction. It weighs severity, recency, source category, location quality, repetition, and supply-chain relevance. A high score means a signal deserves human attention sooner. It does not mean a shipment will fail, a supplier has stopped production, or a commodity price will move. A low score means the public evidence is weaker or less relevant, not that the underlying world is risk-free.
TremorWatch emphasizes mechanisms. A flood matters when it can affect a road, port, rail line, warehouse, farm region, mine, or workforce. Unrest matters when it can affect a border crossing, industrial district, customs process, or security environment. Commodity context matters when production, processing, transport, or substitution constraints connect the public signal to operational exposure.
Editorial review and limitations
Briefings are designed to reduce noise by grouping signals into weekly reports, data-source explainers, and methodology notes instead of flooding the site with raw event pages. Public data can be delayed, duplicated, incomplete, or revised. Location precision may vary. Some events are important locally but have little supply-chain consequence for a particular company. Readers should use TremorWatch as a review layer and validate any decision against their own supplier data, carrier updates, contracts, and operational constraints.