Water Resilience Map

WARM

Shows where and when water stress occurs, so you can act before it hurts.

The challenge

Droughts and water stress cost Europe alone around 9 billion euros a year. Yet water resilience is still assessed country by country or in small test regions. The result is a flood of fragmented maps and statistics that are hard to read, especially for the people who have to decide.

Our approach

WARM reads water quantity, water quality and water temperature from satellite data, anywhere in the world, at 10 metres resolution. Then it compares every value with what is normal for that place and that time of year, and marks where and when the water deviates from the norm.

What WARM sees.

Three criteria, read from Sentinel and Landsat satellites, for any water body and any point in time.

Water quantity

Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical data map the water surface of rivers, lakes and reservoirs. WARM derives the normal water level for a region and flags seasonal change and extreme deviations against the long-term average.

Water quality

Remote sensing indicators such as chlorophyll and suspended matter are translated into the trophic state of a water body. The trophic state describes its health and nutrient load, and whether the water is fit for irrigation or drinking.

Water temperature

Thermal satellite data gives the surface temperature of every water body. Rising temperatures put ecosystems, drinking water and irrigation under stress long before a river runs dry.

Satellite image of the Guadalquivir with the detected water surface marked in blue — Water quantity: detected water surface of the Guadalquivir near Córdoba

Satellite image of the Guadalquivir with trophic state of the river coloured from blue to red — Water quality: trophic state of the same stretch of river, from oligotrophic (blue) to hypereutrophic (red)

Not just low. Lower than usual.

Little rain in August is normal in many places. The question is whether this August had less water than a usual August. WARM compares every value over the years and marks what deviates from the norm. You see at a glance when water stress occurred, and where.

See when

The timeline marks every month in which quantity, quality or temperature deviated from the same month in previous years. August was not normal.

See where

Click into that month, and the map shows exactly where the deviation occurred: which stretch of river, which reservoir, which fields.

Act, and check

Address the problem where it is. Later, WARM shows whether the measure worked, on site and downstream. And over the years, recurring patterns make the next stress period predictable.

WARM dashboard on a laptop: map of the Guadalquivir with charts for water quantity, quality and temperature

Why WARM.

Water projects live on evidence. Today that evidence is collected on site, by hand, project by project. WARM delivers it from space, for every region, year after year.

One picture instead of many

Quantity, quality and temperature on one map, so a basin in Kenya and a river in Spain can be compared and explained at a glance, also by non-scientists.

Any region, any size

From a single reservoir to a whole river basin, anywhere in the world.

Cheaper than fieldwork

Satellite data is available immediately, for any region. WARM monitors permanently, at a fraction of the cost of repeated on-site surveys.

Looks back in time

Satellite archives reach back to 2015. They show what normal looks like, and let WARM assess a project that started years ago, without any data collected at the time.