The Paraná River in northern Argentina. Confluence,
which is open-source and free to use, allows researchers to estimate river
discharge and suspended sediment levels in Earth’s rivers at a global scale.
NASA/ISS
Rivers and streams wrap around Earth in
complex networks millions of miles long, driving trade, nurturing ecosystems,
and stocking critical reserves of freshwater.
But the hydrologists who dedicate their
professional lives to studying this immense web of waterways do so with a
relatively limited set of tools. Around the world, a patchwork of just 3,000 or
so river gauge stations supply regular, reliable data, making it difficult for
hydrologists to detect global trends.
“The best way to study a river,” said
Colin Gleason, Armstrong Professional Development Professor of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “is to
get your feet wet and visit it yourself. The second best way to study a river
is to use a river gauge.”
Now, thanks to Gleason and a team of
more than 30 researchers, there’s another option: ‘Confluence,’ an analytic
collaborative framework that leverages data from NASA’s
Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission
and the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 archive
(HLS) to estimate river discharge
and suspended sediment levels in every river on Earth wider than 50 meters. NASA’s
Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) hosts the software, making it open-source and free for users
around the world.
By incorporating both altimetry data from SWOT which informs discharge estimates, and optical data from HLS, which informs estimates of suspended sediment data, Confluence marks the first time hydrologists can create timely models of river size and water quality at a global scale. Compared to existing workflows for estimating suspended sediment using HLS data, Confluence is faster by a factor of 30.
“I can’t do global satellite hydrology without this
system. Or, I could, but it would be extremely time consuming and expensive.
Colin Gleason
Nikki Tebaldi, a Cloud Adoption Engineer
at NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and
Co-Investigator for Confluence, was the lead developer on this project. She
said that while the individual components of Confluence have been around for
decades, bringing them together within a single, cloud-based processing
pipeline was a significant challenge.
“I’m really proud that we’ve pieced
together all of these different algorithms, got them into the cloud, and we
have them all executing commands and working,” said Tebaldi.
Suresh Vannan, former manager of PO.DAAC
and a Co-Investigator for Confluence, said this new ability to produce timely,
global estimates of river discharge and quality will have a huge impact on
hydrological models assessing everything from the health of river ecosystems to
snowmelt.
“There are a bunch of science
applications that river discharge can be used for, because it’s pretty much
taking a snapshot of what the river looks like, how it behaves. Producing that
snapshot on a global scale is a game changer,” said Vannan.
While the Confluence team is still
working with PO.DAAC to complete their software package, users can currently
access the Confluence source code here. For tutorials, manuals, and other
user guides, visit the PO.DAAC webpage here.
All of these improvements to the
original Confluence algorithms developed for SWOT were made possible by NASA’s
Advanced Intelligent Systems Technology (AIST) program, a part of the agency’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), in collaboration with SWOT and PO.DAAC.
To learn more about opportunities to
develop next-generation technologies for studying Earth from outer space, visit
ESTO’s solicitation page here.
Project Lead: Colin Gleason / University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Sponsoring Organization: Advanced Intelligent Systems Technology program, within NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office
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