Source-water visibility, without instrumenting every kilometre.
Algal blooms, agricultural runoff, climate impacts — see them across the whole catchment from space, cross-checked with weather and the few ground sensors you have.
The challenge
Source water quality is everyone's problem and no one's instrument. The catchment is too big to sensor; the river is too long; the lake has a hundred kilometres of shoreline; and the impacts that matter (chlorophyll, turbidity, temperature, sediment plumes) move on weather and seasonal scales.
Most utilities respond to source-water events when they hit the intake. By then, the operational choice is constrained: run on stockpile, blend with a different source, or accept the increased treatment cost. Earlier signal = earlier choice = better outcome.
What success looks like
How WaterTwin delivers it
- ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2 indices — chlorophyll, turbidity, and clarity across reservoirs, rivers, and coastal waters. 10–20 m resolution, 5-day revisit, processed every six hours.
- Sentinel-3 sea-surface temperature — daily coverage for coastal intakes, harbours, and large lakes; informs treatment planning and harmful algal bloom risk.
- Weather data integration — rainfall, temperature, and wind correlated with catchment response in a single timeline. "High rainfall > X mm → turbidity spike at intake in 18h" becomes a learnable pattern rather than tribal knowledge.
- Multi-signal alarms — combine satellite-derived chlorophyll trend, weather forecast, and ground-sensor readings into a single early-warning rule with severity-aware routing.
- Map view across the catchment — every intake, every sampling point, every defined polygon visible together. Click any of them to drill in.
- Time-series history for retrospective analysis of past events — useful for regulator briefings and for tuning your alarm thresholds.
A typical monitoring workflow
- Define the polygons you care about — reservoirs, river reaches, estuarine zones, source-water protection areas.
- WaterTwin pulls the latest Sentinel-2 / Sentinel-3 imagery for each polygon every six hours and computes the indices.
- Weather feeds (rainfall, temperature, wind) merge into the same time-series.
- Catchment manager defines early-warning rules: "alert when chlorophyll > 30 mg/m³ in reservoir X AND surface temperature > 22°C AND wind < 5 m/s — algal bloom risk."
- When a rule fires, the operations team sees days of advance signal rather than discovering the event at the intake.
Where it lands first
- Reservoir managers — early algal bloom and chlorophyll signal lets you change abstraction strategy or treatment configuration in advance.
- Coastal intakes — sea-surface temperature and turbidity coverage for desalination and industrial intakes.
- River-fed treatment plants — runoff and turbidity events upstream become forward-looking, not historical.
- Environmental regulators — wide-area, repeatable monitoring across catchments you couldn't reach with ground sensors.
What you need to start
- The set of catchments or reservoirs you want monitored (a rough polygon or coordinates is enough — we'll refine).
- Any ground-sensor data you already have for cross-validation.
- A view on which thresholds matter operationally — if you don't know yet, we'll start with sensible defaults from the literature.
Send us a catchment polygon. We'll show what the satellites see.
Pick a reservoir, river reach, or coastal zone. We'll have last-week's indices loaded for your demo call.
Book a walkthrough