Integrating NASA Datasets into Utility Water Resources Planning and Management

This webinar will provide an overview of NASA’s remote sensing data sets and products and describe how the data sets can be used to support utility monitoring, modeling, and management efforts. An overview will also cover satellites, instruments, and products related to climate and hydrologic conditions; watershed/land use characteristics; and source water quality. Successful applications of remote sensing data for water resources management will be demonstrated and descriptions given of ongoing efforts to make these data more readily accessible to water utilities.

Satellite remote sensing observations of watershed land surface conditions and water bodies have shown promise for describing hydrologic and climate conditions and supporting characterization and monitoring of source water quality. Freely available remote sensing data sets can provide snapshots of  entire watersheds at regular intervals, allowing utilities to track changes in watershed conditions, augment in situ monitoring, and provide predictive capability, but few utilities possess the specialized technical skills required to acquire, process, and analyze this data. This webinar’s goal is to close the gap between utility analysts and NASA’s remote sensing data sets.

The single biggest challenge to effective water quality monitoring is reliable, long-term funding. For traditional data collection, a practical limit governs how many samples can be collected and analyzed cost-effectively. Besides costs of laboratory analyses, the costs and difficulties of frequently collecting samples across an entire watershed, which may span hundreds or thousands of square miles, are major and inexpressibly difficult to manage. Accordingly, utilities and resource managers must often make do with limited water quality data sets for decision making. This webinar introduces free, robust data sets that can raise a utility’s understanding of conditions associated with water quality challenges and provide information to support source water management and monitoring.