← Yamama Amir

Industry work · pipeline integrity · satellite imagery

Channel Migration

Rivers move. This app traces each one from satellite imagery, year after year, and lays the traces over the pipelines.

See a bend ↓
Company
Earthbound AI, which models natural hazards for pipeline operators
Role
GIS engineer, primary developer
Years
2026
Stack
React · Tailwind · Mapbox GL · FastAPI · DuckDB · GeoParquet on S3
channel migration · river masks
Satellite map of a meandering river with its channel outline from each year laid over it in colour, oranges for the older years through purple to light blue for the latest, and a table below listing river-mask collections with a button for each year

One bend, every traced year at once. River, route and place names are blurred.

The brief

See the bank coming before it reaches the pipe

A pipe laid under a river was laid for the river as it was then. Meanders creep sideways, banks cut back, and a crossing designed for one channel can end up under another. The change is slow enough to miss from one year to the next, and plain on the map once the years are stacked.

The app was the newest of the three I worked on at Earthbound, and I was its primary developer, on the web app and on the FastAPI service behind it.

01 · River masks

One outline a year, stacked

Each river near the network has a collection of masks: the channel's outline traced from that year's imagery. The table at the bottom lists the collections, close to two thousand of them. Pick one and the map flies to it. Press play and the years run in order, or switch single years on and off to compare two. Where the colours fan out, the river has moved. In the bend above, the older outlines sit well round from where the channel runs now.

  • Colours by age, grouped two years at a time so the stack stays readable
  • Masks in view narrows the table to what the map is showing
river masks · one bend
Close view of a meander bend with yearly channel outlines: orange and red outlines from earlier years swing wide around the bend, while the light blue recent outlines cut a tighter path

The bend up close. The orange and red outlines of the earlier years sit apart from the light blue of the latest ones: that gap is the river moving.

Where river meets pipe

Crossing, parallel or encroachment

Every place a river and a pipe meet is a site, sorted into three types: the river crosses the pipe, runs beside it, or is closing in on it. Each one carries its distance and the angle at which the river meets the pipe. Filter by business unit or route and the side panel counts the sites of each type in view, so an engineer can work down a list instead of scanning the map.