Everything on this page is reproducible from public data. Where we have results, we show them. Where we have plans, we say "target," not "result."
The current model predicts how much water a new well will produce at a given point, before anything is drilled. It is a gradient-boosted decision-tree model — the same family used for credit scoring and fraud detection — trained on the outcomes of real wells.
A model that has seen the answers proves nothing. So we used a temporal holdout: the model learned only from wells drilled before 2018, then scored every well drilled after — wells it had never seen — and we compared its scores to what actually came out of the ground.
165,799 wells completed 1960–2017.
23,772 wells completed 2018–2025, fully hidden during training.
Against what a driller's gut approximates (county average by well type) and against the obvious shortcut (copy the 10 nearest wells).
For agricultural wells: if you drilled only where the model was most confident, how often would you hit strong water (≥200 gpm, the ag threshold)?
| Predictor | R² on 2018+ wells | In sparse areas (no logged well within 2 km) |
|---|---|---|
| County + use-type average (the "gut" baseline) | 0.459 | 0.320 |
| Copy the 10 nearest wells | 0.555 | — |
| Clarity v0 model | 0.599 | 0.494 |
The sparse-area column matters most: where there are no nearby wells to copy is exactly where dowsers get hired — and where the model's edge is largest.
Among 31,208 pairs of wells less than 1 km apart, the median yield difference between neighbors is 1.9×, and 18% of pairs differ by more than 5×. Your neighbor's well is a weak guide to your ground.
Every item below uses data that already exists and is public. The order is the order of value to a client standing on their land with a $400,000 quote.
Every well report contains the driller's layer-by-layer description ("0–40 ft clay, 40–110 ft sand & gravel, water at 95…"). An LLM pipeline parses all 1M+ free-text logs into structured layers: coarse-material fraction, aquifer thickness, depth to first water-bearing zone.
California flew statewide airborne electromagnetic surveys and published 3D resistivity grids — effectively an X-ray of the aquifers. We sample these grids at every historical well and at every candidate site, teaching the model what productive ground looks like in the scan.
Predict the depth of the water-bearing zone, not just the yield — and translate it into the two bills that matter: drilling cost (per foot) and the lifetime electricity cost of lifting every gallon from that depth.
Salinity, nitrate and arsenic vary layer by layer. Using state groundwater-quality monitoring data, the model flags zones where "wet" does not mean "usable."
Water tables are falling. Using decades of groundwater-level monitoring, the model projects whether a site's water is stable, declining, or heading for the 2014–22 dry-well pattern.
Finding water and being allowed to pump it are different questions. This layer scores each site against its basin's management rules and allocation status, so the map never points to water you can't legally use.
A vision model that detects wellheads and active drilling rigs in satellite and aerial imagery — finding unreported wells that hide from state records and watching where drilling activity is moving.
Most states keep public well databases (Texas, Arizona, Nebraska, Kansas, Oregon…). Each new state is a data-ingestion task, not a reinvention: the same pipeline, the same validation, new records.
v1 has no results yet; pre-registering its targets keeps us honest. We will report against these, pass or fail, with the same temporal holdout.
| Target | v0 today | v1 target | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall yield R² (2018+ holdout) | 0.599 | ≥ 0.70 | Geology + AEM should explain what location alone can't. |
| Sparse-area R² (no well within 2 km) | 0.494 | ≥ 0.60 | The dowser zone — where we must win. |
| Top-quintile ag precision (≥200 gpm) | 95% | hold ≥ 93% at 50 m resolution | Keep the hit rate while narrowing from parcel to spot. |
| Depth-to-water error | — | ≤ 15% median | Turns yield into a drilling and pumping bill. |
| Field validation | — | 10 pilot sitings, outcomes published | Real drills, real water, real numbers. |