Blue Dot Water Observatory

Water lies at the heart of economic and social development. As it is becoming scarce, stakeholders need innovative ways to better understand water conditions, predict risks, and tackle problems. Cost-effective, yet reliable solutions for monitoring water resources are needed, as ground-based monitoring networks are often too costly and due to networks deterioration in some cases also unreliable. This is even more true for developing countries.

Being enlightened by JRC’s Global Surface Water project we have built a service, which does not only show historic data but is also up-to-date. Copernicus Sentinel mission, with its global coverage and short revisit time, combined with an efficient use of AWS infrastructure resources makes it feasible to do a global scale project with limited resources. The Blue Dot Water Observatory is an EO-based solution that provides reliable and timely information about surface water levels of water bodies across the globe.

With this service, we also wish to demonstrate how global monitoring of the environment using Earth observation data can be done efficiently and orders of magnitude cheaper than before, if done in an intelligent way. To make it possible to others to build on top of our experience, we share all the code as an open-source.

This presentation was given in July 2019 at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Summer Meeting held in Tacoma, Washington.