Mark the plume.File the evidence.

A neighbor phones the front office, or the air agency forwards a complaint with a date and a time on it. Dust, they say, from the quarry. You are the environmental manager, so it lands on you.

You start with what the site wrote down. The shift log, the water truck record for that day, the wind reading for that hour, the line in the complaint log. Somebody on the ground saw dust coming off the haul road near the ramp, or thought they did. A technician took a few photos from the pit rim. They show a haze and a truck, and they do not show how far it went or which way, and the crusher is somewhere out of frame.

The agency's inspector works the same way from the other side of the fence: wind speed and direction noted, visible emissions photographed from the property line, a few lines in a report. Your reply and their findings both rest on what one or two people could see from where they stood.

That is a thin file to defend a suppression budget with. The truck that sprays the haul road gets more hours because the haul road is the familiar answer, and nobody can show whether the plume started at the road, the crusher feed or the stockpile next to it.

This service adds the view from above. You tell us the site and the window, and we outline the visible dust on a satellite pass and send you the marked image and the extent. It sits next to the log entry instead of replacing it.

An early-access offer. We are shaping the deliverable with the first sites that ask, so the format below is what we plan to send and may change as we learn.

Attach the extent layer to the dust management plan review, or to the complaint file you send back to the agency, as an observation record that outlasts a shift log. When you decide where the next water truck or binder application goes, you have a drawing of the plume to point at.

These are the ways a plume image can mislead you. They are stated up front because a regulator will read the file too.

1. L1Visible dust only

   The outline shows dust you can see from above. It is not a PM10 reading, not a particulate concentration, and not an opacity reading under any method. A fine plume that is faint against pale ground may be only partly outlined.

2. L2One moment, not a record

   The pass is one frame at one time. A plume that rose and died in the hour before the satellite arrived is not in it. This does not show the whole day.

3. L3Daylight and clear sky

   Optical imagery needs light and a clear view. Night, heavy cloud and thick haze defeat it, and the pass we get depends on when a satellite is overhead. We cannot promise it falls on the afternoon of your complaint.

4. L4Resolution sets the floor

   At 0.5–2 m a pixel is a few feet across at best. A wisp behind one truck on a narrow road may be too thin to outline. A larger cloud is easier to outline than a thin one.

5. L5Area, not machine

   The source note points at a road, a crusher or a pile. It does not tell you which truck or loader raised the dust.

6. L6Not a compliance measurement

   This is an imagery-based evidence layer. It is not a certified emissions measurement and does not stand in for the monitoring your permit requires.

• EHS and environmental managers at mines and quarries who need to answer a dust complaint with more than a log entry.
• Teams deciding where suppression spend goes and wanting a picture of where the dust started.
• Regulators and inspectors reviewing a complaint who want a view from above to set beside a ground observation.

Who it's not for

• Sites that want continuous dust monitoring. This is a picture per event, not a feed.
• Teams that need PM10 or any concentration reading. That takes instruments on the ground.
• Teams who need a plume traced to a single machine.
• Sites that need a certified measurement to meet a permit condition.