While global warming puts severe pressure on water bodies, public authorities and industry must balance their efforts to minimise risks. At the same time, public and private entities need to satisfy growing demands for information on water safety. This calls for efficient monitoring of water quality. For far-sighted monitoring routines, satellite sensors can provide many key parameters in near real-time, which was so far reserved for highly skilled analysts.
Now, authorities and industry can gain comprehensive satellite-based information on coastal and inland waters with a few mouse clicks: The cloud-based solution, eoapp AQUA, offers an unprecedented wealth of data and a panoptic view of many water bodies. Users can simply conduct data generation for a specific region on their own, after defining required parameters, observation period, area, and satellite sources according to their needs. For visualising and analysing these results the web app includes an intuitive data viewer, a long-term analysis tool enabling users to look +40 years back in time, a monitoring feature to identify both the status and recent developments in water bodies, plus an alert function based on individual thresholds.
All these features support a physics-based approach to water quality applications, such as bathing waters surveillance, environmental impact monitoring, or climate change studies.
‘The new app offers a pro-active approach to water management. Clients can, for example, detect potentially harmful algae blooms, and take early actions or inform the public’, says Karin Schenk, Head of Water Quality at EOMAP. However, eoapp AQUA not only leads to safer decision-making by boosting data availability. ‘Harvesting satellite data also benefits users by significant time or cost savings. Thus, field campaigns can either be avoided or set-up in a far more targeted way than before’, adds Fabian von Trentini, Innovation Manager at EOMAP.
eoapp AQUA, the new online solution follows the motto “Water quality at your fingertips” and is the key outcome of the ESA Incubed project EOSmart. Big players in the sensor and surveying markets, such as Xylem and Fugro, have helped develop this intuitive web app in line with customer needs.
Following ‘SDB-Online’ for hydrographic or ‘HYPOS’ for hydropower stakeholders, eoapp AQUA is the third in EOMAP’s series of online solutions. These eoapps all have one common target: To provide decision support through fast and simple access to satellite-based information.
