The sky is the limit in water quality prediction
Space satellites will soon help keep local water resources safe and clean.
Tapping into a 13-year partnership, Virginia Tech's Center for Ecosystem Forecasting will work closely with the Western Virginia Water Authority on a new research project to integrate satellite data to help water managers ensure safe drinking water in the Roanoke region.
With a new $600,000 grant from NASA, the Center for Ecosystem Forecasting’s co-directors, Cayelan Carey and R. Quinn Thomas, will work with engineers and managers of the Western Virginia Water Authority to address multiple threats to water safety. George Allen, associate professor in the Department of Geosciences, is also part of the Virginia Tech team.
The Western Virginia Water Authority manages multiple drinking water reservoirs, including Falling Creek, Beaverdam, and Carvins Cove, which supply more than 300,000 residents around the Roanoke region and are focal study sites for the project.
“This research will provide water quality information in sections of our reservoirs that we've not had,” said James Morris, capital improvement project manager at Western Virginia Water Authority. “This will expand our qualitative data and allow us to make better and informed reservoir management decisions. By being able to predict changes in days or weeks in advance, we can shift resources or reaffirm focus to mitigate treatment challenges.”
With variable water levels, warming water temperatures, higher sediment loads, and more frequent phytoplankton blooms, water managers are facing increasing threats, according to Carey. Forecasting potential risks to residential drinking water resources will enable managers to act more quickly to avert adverse effects and save money by mitigating expensive water treatment before it is needed.
Building upon their current Forecasting Lake and Reservoir Ecosystems (FLARE) water quality forecasting system that currently monitors 16 lakes and reservoirs across the globe, Carey and her team will incorporate the data from NASA Earth observation satellites. This new capacity will allow the team to make forecasts at waterbodies that do not have deployed sensors, greatly increasing its utility.
“The FLARE system uses real-time water observations as they become available to update a suite of lake models daily to generate one- to 35 day-ahead forecasts,” said Carey, the Patricia Caldwell Fellow and professor of biological sciences. “In this project, we will be expanding our forecasting system to not just use data from lake water sensors, but now also data from multiple NASA satellites.”
Carey and Thomas are also affiliates with the Fralin Life Sciences Institute and the Global Change Center.
After working closely with the Western Virginia Water Authority water managers, Carey and her team will then scale the updated FLARE forecasting system to other lakes across the U.S. and Australia. Their international partnerships with water resource managers will help ensure the scalability of their forecasting system to increase the number of water bodies for which forecasts can be developed.
