Technology in Water and Agriculture

Remote Sensing of Water Polution - Technology in Water and Agriculture

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

One of the things that I thought was really cool about your presentation was the work that you're doing on water supply. And I wondered if there has been any effort to do remote sensing of water pollution, which was not mentioned, but which is hugely important for agriculture and water, as you know.

Yes. And you know, we've done a lot of ocean remote sensing, ocean color, looking at basically chlorophyll concentrations. But now we've got some research on remote sensing of turbidity, which could be huge. But it's very coarse-scale right now; we're not, it's not there yet, but I think it's coming and so, you know, that's another huge area that I think we will be able to contribute to, in the near future. So you know I think one of the things that we do is, we do make some of our products routinely available. We would love to do more of that, and again, we're sort of funding-limited. But I think partnering -- this is a great place where we could partner with other agencies, as well as even the private sector. You mentioned Google. There's lots of ways we could get our information out better than we can now, and it really would just take some dedicated effort, because putting all the pieces together with some dedicated effort could result in huge advances and could really give you an integrated approach to assessing water and agriculture as well as other sectors like energy.