Where Are the Earth's Streams Flowing Right Now? Dynamic Hydrology Maps from Satellite-Lidar Fusion
, IMDEA Networks
, University of Oxford/Frontier Development Lab
, University of Valencia
, Arizona State University
, osir.io
Inland surface waters expand with floods and contract with droughts, so there is no one map of our streams. A complete map of our daily waters can give us an early warning for where droughts are born: the receding tips of the flowing network. Mapping them over years can give us a map of impermanence of our waters, showing where to expect water, and where not to. Learn about very high resolution satellite imagery and lidar, and the fusion of these sensor data through multi-sensor U-Nets, trained with A100 GPUs on Google Cloud, for mapping flowing networks at the continental scale, every day, stacking the times series maps over many years. The end result is a new map that could fundamentally improve how we manage our water resources around the world. Project Waters of the United States (WOTUS) was researched in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey, Planet, Maxar, NVIDIA, and Google Cloud, toward the ultimate vision of mapping all flowing water on Earth in near-real time.