Blue Dot Water Observatory

BlueDot Water Observatory is an initiative providing up-to-date information about extent of several thousands surface water reservoirs in high-risk areas, based on satellite imagery. Most of us - having the privilege to live in the developed world - treat water as an unlimited resource. We usually don’t think about where water is coming from and how much of it is available. But even if we did, we may encounter several challenges accessing detailed water level information. For some of us the “water ratios” are not that serious – for example, they may impact our ability to wash our cars, water our lawns or fill our pools. For many, however, water scarcity can be life threatening or can significantly impact their way of life. In late 2017 the “Day Zero” was threatening Cape Town, South Africa to effectively be the first city in modern era to run out of water. This made us more aware of the importance of this resource and how water availability is becoming a widespread problem. This inspired us to build the BlueDot Water Observatory. We routinely look at vast resources of Sentinel imagery which gives us weekly updates on the world’s surface conditions. We use these resources to track surface water reservoirs. The work is following a study published in Nature (High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes) that explored the value of processing 32 years of Landsat data to assess availability of water resources around the world. BlueDot Water Observatory continues their study beyond 2015 and is providing up-to-date information about the availability of water resources.