SECTOR PROFILE · WATER QUALITY & ENVIRONMENTAL
Water quality screening across a whole catchment.
Pick a lake, a reservoir or a discharge channel and get back cyanobacterial pigment, sediment turbidity, iron coatings, or wet ground on a tailings embankment.
What people bring us, and how we handle it.
Cyanobacteria against harmless green algae
Broadband NDVI cannot tell the two apart in an inland reservoir, so every bloom looks the same from orbit.
A narrowband pigment reading separates cyanobacteria from ordinary green algae, so a toxic bloom is flagged as itself.
Following acid drainage downstream
Grab samples give you points. Diffuse runoff across a large catchment slips between them.
sub-metre SWIR maps the secondary iron and sulfate coatings along channel beds, reported as one ferric class rather than a named mineral.
Seepage on a tailings embankment
A visual inspection tends to miss moisture breaking out until the wall has already started to slump.
SWIR moisture depth across dates flags ground that stays wet on the downstream wall. Ask Lisaris to re-run the pair each time a new scene lands. The alerting stays advisory.
WORKED EXAMPLE
Case study: Lake Erie cyanobacteria and turbidity screen
Bio-optical screening for cyanobacterial pigment and sediment plumes across the Western Basin of Lake Erie.
Product level gate, then glint
Only water-leaving reflectance products are accepted. A land-corrected product over water returns numbers that look reasonable and are wrong, so it is refused.
Phycocyanin baseline subtraction
A narrowband baseline subtraction gives the height of the pigment absorption. Cell density is not retrieved.
Time series over the water body
One point per acquisition, ordered by ground time, with gaps left visible rather than filled in.
What you get back
Screening rasters that name the published fit behind each layer.
APPLICABLE SOLUTIONS
Layers that fit this sector.
Ready to run over your area, with no configuration step in between.
Surface Water Quality
Screening for pigment and turbidity over inland water, using published fits applied unchanged.
Acid Drainage Screening
Screening for precipitate coatings along discharge channels, with a ferric floor gating the read.
Thermal Water Discharge Anomaly
Brightness temperature contrast at discharge points, against a local baseline drawn from the surrounding water.
Tailings Dam Stability & Seepage
Monitors moisture and sulfate weathering on exposed embankment faces, differenced across dates.
Mine Footprint & Disturbance
Multi-temporal surface disturbance, tailings boundaries and waste rock footprints, measured between dates.
APPLIED SPECTROSCOPY SERIES
Read the method in full.
The unmixing equations, the error propagation, and the validation behind each layer, written out for your own review.
The Spectral Advantage in Water Quality
Bio-optical algorithms for inland water monitoring using hyperspectral sensing.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Questions we get asked about this sector.
RUN IT OVER YOUR GROUND
Run this over your Water Quality area.
Order processing over your area, or a dedicated capture where the archive has nothing usable. Ask Lisaris in plain language to take the area, run the pipeline and tell you when the layers are ready.