Terra Cover Launches ReaLSAT as New Surface Water Monitoring Service

DENVER - Oct. 19, 2020 - PRLog -- Terra Cover announces the release of a new surface water monitoring service, ReaLSAT (Reservoir and Lake Surface Area Timeseries), for freshwater analysis and research. The ReaLSAT service provides global surface area monitoring for water bodies with sizes greater than 0.01 square kilometers. The insights derived from robust tracking of these water bodies enables customers in insurance, water resource management, and infrastructure development industries to incorporate the impact of changes in freshwater availability in business operations.

In a recent case study, Terra Cover analyzed 1329 reservoirs (built for hydropower or irrigation) in Uruguay. In 2018, which witnessed one of the worst regional droughts in history, total surface area decreased by almost 40% across the country. According to Terra Cover analysis, current 2020 figures also show alarming reductions in surface areas.

As part of its commitment to providing best-in-class capabilities for public understanding of critical freshwater resources, Terra Cover is working towards providing an open source dataset, ReaLSAT, that will provide surface area variations of more than 600000 freshwater bodies around the world, including over 18000 reservoirs, at monthly scale from 1984 to 2015. Freshwater researchers can use the dataset with monthly records to determine long term trends and predict future conditions.

"Terra Cover stands committed to increasing knowledge of freshwater resources and we want ReaLSAT to become central to discussions at every level," said Terra Cover CTO Ankush Khandelwal. "The open source dataset will play an important role in raising public awareness. We expect ReaLSAT to fill information gaps while highlighting the importance of freshwater for a number of industries and markets."

About Terra Cover

Terra Cover combines physics, machine learning, and petabytes of satellite imagery to deliver insights about freshwater resources and shape thinking how humankind interacts with the most important natural resource on the planet. By continually monitoring surface water bodies and river systems, Terra Cover provides unparalleled water intelligence to customers with global or local operations. For more information, please contact info@terracover.ai.