{"id":56170,"date":"2025-09-10T23:46:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T23:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/56170\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T23:46:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T23:46:07","slug":"nasa-data-trainings-help-uruguay-navigate-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/56170\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA Data, Trainings Help Uruguay Navigate Drought"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lee esta historia en espa\u00f1ol\u00a0aqu\u00ed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

NASA satellite data and trainings helped Uruguay create a drought-response tool that its National Water Authority now uses to monitor reservoirs and guide emergency decisions. A similar approach could be applied in the United States and other countries around the world.<\/p>\n

From 2018 to 2023, Uruguay experienced its worst drought in nearly a century. The capital city of Montevideo, home to nearly 2 million people, was especially hard hit. By mid-2023, Paso Severino<\/a>, the largest reservoir and primary water source for Montevideo, had dropped to just 1.7% of its capacity. As water levels declined, government leaders declared an emergency. They began identifying backup supplies and asked: Was there water left in other upstream reservoirs \u2014 mainly used for livestock and irrigation \u2014 that could help?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when environmental engineer Tiago Pohren and his colleagues at the National Water Authority (DINAGUA – Ministry of Environment) turned to NASA data and trainings to build an online tool that could help answer that question and improve monitoring of the nation\u2019s reservoirs.<\/p>\n

\u201cSatellite data can inform everything from irrigation scheduling in the Great Plains to water quality management in the Chesapeake Bay,\u201d said Erin Urquhart, manager of the water resources program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. \u201cNASA provides the reliable data needed to respond to water crises anywhere in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The DINAGUA team learned about NASA resources during a 2022 workshop in Buenos Aires, organized by the Interagency Science and Applications Team (ISAT). Led by NASA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Department of State, the workshop focused on developing tools to help manage water in the La Plata River Basin, which spans multiple South American countries including Uruguay.<\/p>\n

At the workshop, researchers from NASA introduced participants to methods for measuring water resources from space. NASA\u2019s Applied Remote Sensing (ARSET) program also provided a primer on remote sensing principles.<\/p>\n

\u201cNASA doesn\u2019t just deliver data,\u201d said John Bolten, NASA\u2019s lead scientist for ISAT and chief of the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. \u201cWe collaborate with our partners and local experts to translate the data into information that is useful, usable, and relevant. That kind of coordination is what makes NASA\u2019s water programs so effective on the ground, at home and around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The DINAGUA team brought ideas and provided guidelines to Pohren for a tool that applies Landsat and Sentinel satellite imagery to detect changes in Uruguay\u2019s reservoirs. Landsat, a joint NASA-U.S. Geological Survey mission, provides decades of satellite imagery to track changes in land and water. The Sentinel missions, a part of the European Commission managed Copernicus Earth Observation program and operated by ESA (the European Space Agency), provide complementary visible, infrared, and microwave imagery for surface water assessments.<\/p>\n

From a young age, Pohren was familiar with water-related challenges, as floods repeatedly inundated his relatives\u2019 homes in his hometown of Montenegro, Brazil. It was extra motivation for him as he scoured ARSET tutorials and taught himself to write computer code. The result was a monitoring tool<\/a> capable of estimating the surface area of Uruguay\u2019s reservoirs over time.<\/p>\n

The tool draws on several techniques to differentiate the surface water extent of reservoirs. These techniques include three optical indicators derived from the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellites:<\/p>\n