Novarly Parcel
Frequently asked questions
How do you know a report is right?
Three ways, all of them public. Every morning at 06:20 UTC we ask each data source a paid report depends on a question whose answer we verified by hand, and any change or outage emails us. Every paid report records which sections came back empty as it is built, and a missing must-have section raises an alert at once. And every sale sends the founder the exact report the customer received, so a person looks at each one. When we do get something wrong we say so: the corrections log, with causes and fixes, is at parcel.novarly.com/how-we-check. A report we sold that was wrong is refunded in full.
Where in the US is the ground sinking with no known cause?
Our analysis clustered every InSAR measurement sinking faster than 5 mm a year across the covered datasets (28 metros, the Atlantic coast, New York) into 53 coherent patches, then subtracted every cause we could test — documented groundwater subsidence, oil and gas wells, karst and sinkhole hotspots, mines, Superfund sites, and wetland soils checked at the sinking points themselves. Thirty patches are explained, and the famous cases (Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas) classify correctly. Thirteen are not — eleven of them on the Delmarva Peninsula, on farmland rather than marsh. “Unexplained” means no tested explanation fits, not that none exists: post-glacial adjustment and farm groundwater pumping remain open candidates. Full method, per-cluster verdicts and the data: parcel.novarly.com/sinking-unexplained.
Will there be a surge in UK subsidence claims?
Our dated forecast says the coming claims period should be an elevated one. In the satellite soil-moisture record, summer 2026 is the driest of 26 years over Britain’s Significant shrink–swell clay and summer 2025 was second driest — back-to-back desiccation of the ground that drives claims. The same index back-predicts the documented surge summers of 2022, 2006 and 2018, and scores the quiet wet summers as wet; 2003, whose drought arrived in autumn, is documented as the exception. A wet autumn can still blunt the outcome, and the forecast is about direction and scale, never a precise count. Method, hindcast and the commitment to append the outcome: parcel.novarly.com/uk/clay-forecast.
Where is the hottest street in my city?
We measured it — at block level. Using Landsat surface temperature composited over the clearest summer days of 2021–2024, we found the hottest ~150 m block in each of the 34 British cities we cover, named to its nearest postcode and ward. Birmingham’s runs 12.0°C above the city’s summer norm (the Castle Bromwich industrial belt); every city’s hottest block is an industrial estate or dense commercial core, which is the physics behaving — dark roofs and tarmac with no vegetation. Nationally, 121,819 addresses sit on ground at least 5°C above their town’s norm, and parks measure about 2°C cooler than the built-up fabric. This is daytime surface heat relative to each city’s own median — not air temperature, not a health claim, and cities are never ranked against each other. Full league table and CSV: parcel.novarly.com/uk/hottest-streets.
Where are wildfires burning in the UK right now?
Our live tracker archives every satellite heat detection over Britain and Ireland. Three polar-orbiting satellites (Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21) carry the VIIRS instrument over these islands roughly six times a day; NASA FIRMS publishes each 375 m hot pixel for 24 hours and we archive them every 30 minutes, clustering nearby detections into named fire events with an interactive map and a free CSV. Honest limits, stated plainly: detections arrive one to three hours after the satellite passes, cloud hides fires entirely, a detection is a hot pixel and not a perimeter, and this is an archive — never an alert service. If you can see fire or smoke, call 999. Substantial fires later get their burn scar measured from Sentinel-2 imagery, the regime where our scar method verifiably works: parcel.novarly.com/uk/wildfires.
Which of the world’s water reserves are being drained faster than rain can explain?
We took 24 years of GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite gravity data — twin spacecraft that literally weigh the planet month by month — over 27 aquifer-scale regions, and reconstructed each region’s rainfall history to ask whether the rain explains the change. Seventeen regions are losing water mass; for fifteen the loss is structural — rainfall bookkeeping cannot account for it — led by northwest India, the Iranian plateau and the Arabian aquifer. Together they shed roughly 65 cubic kilometres a year, about two Lake Meads. The figures are box totals of all water (soil, snow, surface and ground together) at satellite resolution, never a verdict on any one wellfield, and the controls — documented hotspots, wet basins, a gaining lake — are printed with the result: parcel.novarly.com/water-debt.
Which American landfills are sinking fastest?
We measured every landfill in the EPA’s national database with coordinates — over two thousand sites — against NASA’s OPERA radar archive (2016–2025), fitting a velocity to every radar pixel in a window over each one. The fastest clear 40+ mm a year of local sinking. The honest caveats: these are line-of-sight velocities of local motion relative to the surrounding ~30 km (regional bowls like Houston’s are removed by construction); about one random patch of American ground in eleven clears the same 5 mm/yr bar, a base rate we print beside the list; and settling is what landfills normally do — measured motion is not a verdict on any site’s engineering. Every control result is printed, including the pre-registered control that failed. Ranked table, method and full per-site CSV: parcel.novarly.com/us/sinking.
How much of British sea-level rise is the land sinking?
A tide gauge records the sea relative to its own ground, so land motion is baked into every record. We fitted the trend at every UK gauge with a modern 30+-year record (14 of 75) and measured the ground under each one with GNSS and satellite InSAR. At ten of the fourteen, land motion is at least a quarter of the recorded trend. At Newlyn — the gauge Ordnance Datum is defined from — roughly a third of the recorded rise is the pier itself sinking, while at Sheerness rising ground means the Thames Estuary’s real rise is faster than its record. Per-gauge table, method and CSV: parcel.novarly.com/uk/sea-level-record.
Where is Britain sinking, and why?
We measured all of Great Britain with the European Ground Motion Service (2020–2024): 6.6 million satellite radar points, of which 225,760 hundred-metre cells are sinking faster than 5 mm a year — with 55,769 addresses on them. Two thirds of that fast-sinking ground is peat (the Pennines, the Flow Country, the Fens); by addresses the map points at the coalfield towns — Doncaster, Wakefield, Mansfield — where sinking is consistent with mining legacy. After testing every patch against eight mapped cause layers, 36 patches carry no mapped cause at all, and they clump in a handful of specific places. Full method, tables and the per-cluster CSV: parcel.novarly.com/uk/sinking.
How many homes in England will not be defended from coastal erosion?
The honest unit is addresses, not homes — open address data cannot split houses from businesses. Our analysis of the Environment Agency’s NCERM 2024 dataset joined to all 41.6 million GB address points found tens of thousands of English addresses inside the coastal recession projected by 2105 on frontages whose own Shoreline Management Plan policy is No Active Intervention or Managed Realignment. The exact figure, a per-authority table, the method and the downloadable data are at parcel.novarly.com/uk/not-defended. A Shoreline Management Plan is intent rather than a funded commitment, and a projection is not a prediction for any single property.
Is my house sinking?
Most homes are on stable ground, but parts of many US metros are measurably subsiding — often from groundwater changes, soft fill, or historic land reclamation. Enter your address on our homepage for a free screening based on satellite radar measurements.
How can a satellite possibly measure millimetres?
InSAR compares the phase of radar pulses across hundreds of satellite passes over years. Phase shifts reveal ground motion far smaller than the radar wavelength. It is peer-reviewed science used worldwide to monitor dams, mines, bridges, and volcanoes.
What does a red or amber result mean?
It means ground within 150 m of the address has been measured moving downward notably fast (amber: 3-10 mm/yr, red: over 10 mm/yr). It does not mean the building is damaged — it means the ground context deserves a professional look. Share the report with a licensed geotechnical engineer.
My result says "no measurement available." Is that good news?
Neither good nor bad. Radar needs reflective surfaces (roofs, pavement); vegetated lots, brand-new construction, and water return no reliable measurement. Absence of data is not evidence of stability, and we will never pretend otherwise.
Does "green" guarantee my property is safe?
No. Green means no notable ground motion was measured nearby in the satellite record. Localized issues smaller than the measurement grid, drainage problems, or structural matters are invisible to any satellite. A screening informs — it never replaces — professional advice.
Why does ground sink at all?
Common causes: groundwater extraction, compaction of soft sediments and landfill, historic marshland or coastal reclamation, drainage of organic soils, and in some regions glacial isostatic adjustment — the slow ongoing response of the crust since the last ice age.
Which areas do you cover?
Ground-motion measurements cover 28 major US metros and the entire US Atlantic coast (45 million+ InSAR measurements). The full $19 report works for every geocodable US address — flood, wildfire, Superfund, dam, shoreline and sea-level data are nationwide even where InSAR is not. In the UK, coastal-erosion and coal-mining checks work for any GB postcode.
What do I get in the paid US report?
Measured ground-motion rates at and around your address with metro context, your FEMA flood zone, century-scale shoreline change and combined sea-level exposure for coastal addresses, USFS wildfire hazard at the address and in the ~1 km around it, the nearest Superfund site and nearest high-hazard dam with distances, a plain-English narrative, and a downloadable PDF.
Will the sea reach my home? (UK)
The Environment Agency publishes official erosion projections (NCERM 2024) for the English coast: metres of expected coastline loss by 2055 and 2105, with and without maintained defences. Some frontages are projected to lose over 150 metres this century. Check any postcode free at parcel.novarly.com/uk; Scotland is covered via NatureScot Dynamic Coast.
What is under my house? (UK)
Three things you can read for free in seconds at parcel.novarly.com/uk/home: whether the natural ground is stable (the British Geological Survey GeoSure ratings for shrink–swell clay, landslide, dissolution, compressible and collapsible ground at the exact point), whether the address is in a planning flood zone (Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales or SEPA, read from the national mapper for that country), and whether it sits on the coalfield (Mining Remediation Authority risk areas). Each line names its source, and a map that could not be read is reported as unread rather than clear. The £19 HomeGround report then adds the measured ground motion at the point from satellite radar, the recorded mine entries around the address, radon, road and rail noise, air quality, historic landfill, street crime, live planning applications nearby, nearest schools with Ofsted, broadband, EPC bands and the postcode’s sales history since 1995. Great Britain only — a Northern Ireland address can be placed but the datasets stop at the Irish Sea.
Was my house built over a coal mine? (UK)
Around a quarter of GB homes sit on the historic coalfield, above 175,000+ recorded mine shafts. The Mining Remediation Authority (formerly the Coal Authority) maps Development High Risk Areas where recorded mining legacy could affect ground stability. Check any GB postcode free at parcel.novarly.com/mining. The £19 report works on or off the coalfield — it adds measured ground motion (how fast the ground actually moved 2020-2024, from EGMS Sentinel-1 satellite radar on a 100 m grid), natural ground stability (BGS shrink-swell clay, landslide and more), a clay-shrinkage outlook for this summer on shrink-swell ground, radon potential, road & rail noise, air quality (PM2.5 and NO2 vs WHO limits), historic landfill, flood zone and likelihood, street crime trends, planning applications near the address, nearest schools with Ofsted outcomes, broadband availability (superfast to gigabit full fibre), EPC bands and the postcode’s full sales history — before paying for the official CON29M search in conveyancing.
Which councils approve solar farms and battery storage? (UK)
We publish approval rates and median decision times for solar farms, battery storage and onshore wind in every planning authority in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, computed from recorded outcomes in the government Renewable Energy Planning Database — not modelled. UK-wide, solar runs about 93% approved and battery storage about 92%, while onshore wind sits near 68%, the practical legacy of England’s restrictive wind policy. We also measure what each planning CONSTRAINT costs, by joining those outcomes to the national designation boundaries — the Green Belt gap for ground-mounted solar has largely closed since 2018, while the National Landscape gap has widened: parcel.novarly.com/uk/renewable-planning/constraints. Browse any council at parcel.novarly.com/uk/renewable-planning. One honest limit: REPD records outcomes but not refusal REASONS, so we never claim to explain why a scheme failed.
Will my site get planning permission for a solar farm? (UK)
Nobody can promise that, but you can read the record before you spend on consultants. Our site screening takes a postcode or coordinates and returns the local authority’s actual approval rate and median decision time for that technology, every planning designation whose boundary contains the point (Green Belt, National Landscape/AONB, SSSI, conservation area, scheduled monument, nutrient-neutrality catchment), the agricultural land grade that drives the “best and most versatile” test, the PVGIS solar yield at optimal tilt with a P90, how much earth would have to move to level the plot and roughly what that costs (from Environment Agency 1 m LIDAR), how much grid capacity is already contracted nearby, and what happened to comparable schemes within 25 km — refusals included. Try it at parcel.novarly.com/uk/solar-site. It is a screening from public data, not planning advice: landscape and cumulative impact are professional judgements no dataset contains.
Which parts of town get hottest in summer? (UK)
The £19 UK property report includes an urban-heat-island reading: how much hotter or cooler a block runs than its town average on clear summer days. We process Landsat satellite land-surface temperature ourselves — several cloud-free summer scenes composited to a ~150 m grid — for 34 GB cities (London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and more), then show where the address sits as a percentile of the town. It is a relative, daytime SURFACE-heat indicator (asphalt, roofs and industrial land read hottest; parks and vegetation coolest — open water is excluded from the grid) — not indoor, overnight, or air temperature, and not a heat-health claim. Addresses outside the covered cities simply do not show the row rather than guessing.
How do you assess wildfire risk?
We read the US Forest Service Wildfire Hazard Potential (2023, 30 m resolution) at your address AND in a ring ~1 km around it. That matters because developed lots rate as "non-burnable" even when the surrounding vegetation rates Very High — homes burn from the vegetation around them, as Paradise, California showed in 2018.
What is combined sea-level exposure?
Tide gauges measure how fast the sea is rising locally; InSAR measures whether your land is also sinking. A coast with 3 mm/yr of sea-level rise on land sinking 2 mm/yr faces about 5 mm/yr of effective relative rise. We combine the NOAA gauge trend nearest you with measured local ground motion into one number.
Where can I look up a specific wind or solar farm? (UK)
Every one of the 3,533 named renewable sites that is operational or under construction in the UK has its own page here, covering 78.9 GW of capacity. Each shows the installed capacity, the operator of record, the full planning timeline from application to consent to operation with the gaps computed, the local authority’s own approval rate for that technology, the planning designations the site sits on, and other built sites within 15 km. The government publishes the underlying data but only through a map viewer that search engines cannot read.
Which property searches do I actually need when buying a house? (UK)
A local authority search (LLC1 and CON29) and a drainage and water search are ordered on essentially every purchase. Beyond those it depends on where the property is, and for several searches the trigger is public data we can check per address: the coalfield reporting area drives a CON29M coal search, flood zones and surface-water likelihood drive a flood search, nearby historic landfill drives an environmental search, and the radon and ground-stability bands decide whether those reports are worth buying. Some searches — chancel repair liability, Cheshire brine, non-coal mineral searches — cannot be settled from any public dataset, and we say so rather than leaving them out.
Can I legally metal-detect on this land? (England)
The legal position is checkable from public registers, and our free Landcheck check does it for any English postcode or spot: scheduled monuments — where using a metal detector without consent is a criminal offence under s.42 of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 — SSSIs, CROW open-access land (the right to walk does not include a right to detect) and registered common land. Even on land with no designation at all the answer is never a plain yes: you need permission from the landowner AND the occupier everywhere, finds that may be treasure must be reported under the Treasure Act 1996 within 14 days, and finds should be recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The £19 Landcheck report adds the ground itself for the 1 km square — Environment Agency 1 m LIDAR terrain renders, drought-summer satellite imagery beside a normal-year baseline, named heritage sites as no-go flags, and a landowner permission pack with the £3 HM Land Registry route to the registered owner. It never locates finds; nothing is shown sharper than the 1 km square. Try it at parcel.novarly.com/detectorist. The registers checked cover England only — in Wales start with Cadw, in Scotland the law differs (Treasure Trove).
How deep is the water table on this land? (England)
It is measured, not guessed: the Environment Agency logs groundwater levels at roughly 3,600 monitoring boreholes across England, each with a surveyed ground datum, so depth to water is a real subtraction. Our free Wellcheck check reads the nearest monitoring borehole to any English postcode or spot and shows today’s depth below ground and the aquifer it monitors. The £19 report reads the three nearest boreholes — the 12-month high and low at each, where today sits in that range, whether levels are rising or falling, and record highs and lows on archives that can run back to the 1960s — plus the BGS hydrogeology of your point (would a borehole here actually yield water, and roughly how much), the drinking-water source protection zone check, and the rules for a private supply: up to 20 m³ a day needs no abstraction licence in England, water boreholes are notified to the BGS, and drinking supplies are registered with the local council. Try it at parcel.novarly.com/uk/water-table. The measured levels are England-only; the geology layer covers the whole UK.
Can I extend this house without planning permission? (England)
Most houses in England have householder permitted-development rights — a single-storey rear extension up to 4 m (detached) or 3 m (other houses), 8 m / 6 m under the larger-home prior-approval route, up to 4 m high, eaves no more than 3 m within 2 m of a boundary, no more than half the curtilage covered — but they are cut back on Article 2(3) land (conservation areas, national parks, AONBs, World Heritage Sites), removed by Article 4 directions, and replaced by listed building consent for listed houses. Flats have none. Our free Extendcheck verdict reads the designations at your point from planning.data.gov.uk and checks the council has actually published its Article 4 directions before saying "full rights". The £19 report adds every constraint within 50 m with what it changes, the geology and nearest tall tree turned into a foundation-depth band, party wall distances, a sun map of the garden on three dates, and three years of neighbours’ householder decisions within 100 m. Free verdict at parcel.novarly.com/uk/extension.
Could a sinkhole open up under my house? (UK)
Nobody can predict a sinkhole, and our free Sinkcheck check says so before it says anything else. What it can read is the setting and the record: the British Geological Survey’s GeoSure rating of whether the rock in the 5 km area dissolves (chalk, limestone, gypsum or salt — Ripon’s gypsum is Britain’s fastest), whether a recorded coal-mine entry lies within about 100 m (collapse over old workings, the crown hole, is the commonest way British ground opens up), and the satellite-measured ground motion at the nearest cell from the European Ground Motion Service — is the ground here already sinking. The result is Low, Moderate or Significant with its reasons and limits printed: the rating is area-level, the mine layer is presence-only, and burst mains, old culverts and made ground can open a hole on any geology and are not mapped. Try it at parcel.novarly.com/uk/sinkholes. The full £19 HomeGround report maps the mine entries and coalfield risk areas in detail.
Is this address in sinkhole country? (US)
About a fifth of the United States sits on rock that dissolves, and our free Sinkcheck check reads three public records for any address: the USGS national karst map (carbonate or evaporite rock at the surface, under a shallow cover of sand and clay — the Florida cover-collapse setting — or under thick glacial drift; or pseudokarst such as lava tubes), every Florida Geological Survey reported subsidence incident within 1 km with its date, distance, size and whether the FGS verified it as a true sinkhole (Florida is the only state with an open, address-level register), and NASA OPERA satellite radar for whether the ground has already been measured moving. Nobody can predict a sinkhole; the check reports the setting, the record and the movement, which is where a geologist starts. Try it at parcel.novarly.com/us/sinkholes. The $19 HomeGround report carries the same sinkhole section beside flood, wildfire, earthquake and environmental records.
Is it safe to swim in this river or lake? (England)
Only designated bathing waters are tested, so the honest first answer for most river bends is "nobody has measured it". Our free Swimcheck map scores every designated site in England — coast, rivers and lakes — from the Environment Agency’s annual classification (four seasons of E. coli and enterococci samples), its daily pollution-risk forecast, the latest in-season sample, and our own storm-overflow archive: every water company’s monitored overflow polled every 30 minutes, so the map knows which overflows within 5 km discharged this week, and which are discharging now. Green, amber and red are a transparent heuristic with its parts printed, never medical advice; 5 km is a radius rather than a flow path; and most of England’s classified river bathing waters are rated Poor, while the lakes are mostly Excellent. Click anywhere on the map for the nearest tested sites and the overflows around the point: parcel.novarly.com/uk/wild-swimming.
Will the sea defences in front of my house be maintained? (UK)
The Shoreline Management Plan for your frontage states an intention, and it is not always to keep defending. Policy comes in two epochs, and it changes between them more often than people expect: some frontages are Hold The Line in the medium term but No Active Intervention or Managed Realignment in the long term. Our coastal report gives the policy for both epochs plus the erosion intent behind each. An SMP is non-statutory though — it states intent, does not commit funding, is reviewed periodically, and applies to a stretch of coast rather than to one property.
Is my development exempt from biodiversity net gain? (England)
From 6 August 2026, a planning application whose red-line site area is 0.2 hectares (2,000 m²) or below is exempt from mandatory BNG — unless on-site priority habitat is negatively impacted. Before that date the route is the existing de minimis test: under 25 m² of on-site habitat impacted, or under 5 m of linear habitat such as hedgerow. Householder applications are exempt regardless of area. Our free checker tests both limbs of the new exemption: your area, converted from hectares, square metres or acres, and Natural England’s Priority Habitat Inventory at the site. Note the inventory is indicative mapping rather than a survey, so it can show habitat is present but never prove none is — an ecologist settles that, and your local planning authority validates the application.
Where does your data come from?
Entirely from open, credited scientific and government sources: peer-reviewed InSAR research (Ohenhen et al., Nature Cities 2025 and related datasets), Copernicus Sentinel-1, FEMA, USGS, NOAA, USACE, USFS, EPA, the US Drought Monitor, USDA, the Environment Agency, NRW, SEPA, NatureScot, and the Mining Remediation Authority. Every report cites its sources.
Does being in the Green Belt stop a solar farm? (UK)
Not automatically, and there is a measured answer rather than an opinion — but the era matters more than the designation. Since 2018, 154 ground-mounted solar schemes were decided inside the Green Belt in England and 90% were approved, against 94% outside it: a 4-point difference that, on 15 refusals, is not distinguishable from no gap at all. Pooled across all years on record the gap looks far worse — 78% against 90% over 296 decisions, 12 points — because that pool is dominated by an earlier planning regime. Quoting the all-time figure to someone deciding a site today overstates the hurdle. These are associations, not causes: a designation is one of many reasons a scheme succeeds or fails, and the coordinate we test is a single representative point rather than the site boundary. Full workings at parcel.novarly.com/uk/renewable-planning/constraints.
How much UK renewable capacity has planning permission but was never built? (UK)
41.3 GW across 2,247 schemes is still recorded as awaiting construction past its statutory commencement deadline — three years in England and Scotland, five in Wales and Northern Ireland — with another 8.1 GW crossing that line within six months. Capacity is summed over the 1,978 of those schemes that state one, so do not divide the two figures for an average scheme size. That is not the same as saying those permissions have expired, and we never say it is: the recorded data does not carry the commencement condition or whether work lawfully began, and once development begins a permission stops expiring. Treat it as consents worth checking.