Our forests are more than just trees, you know? They're part of a living water filtration system that provides millions of people with clean drinking water.A severe fire burns vegetation that normally holds soil in place. And then when it rains, instead of soil slowly absorbing and filtering through the forest, it rushes across the burned ground. This increases the risk of flooding, mudslides, and debris flows into water supplies downstream.
NASA satellites are helping us protect something incredibly personal. The water that sustains our communities, our families, and our lives. From space, we can see how Earth's systems are interconnected. Our atmosphere, forests, soil, water, working together in an intricate dance to sustain life. Our satellites can map, model, and monitor watersheds to help communities take action before and after a wildfire.
We hadn't really had those kind of larger, catastrophic wildfires in this area before, the Holiday Farm Fire that came through, burned, almost 200,000 acres. And that was a concern for our drinking water as well.
We use remotely sense data, which is information that's generated by satellite to process it into a map and can help understand what potential impacts from fire might be on their water quality.
Following intense wildfire, excessive sediment and potential contaminants can enter local waterways and overwhelm downstream treatment plants.
And so when you add a lot more sediment, to the river system, that takes more energy and time to remove that sediment to provide clean drinking water.
NASA data helps complement data from our community partners, and lead to a more informed data set that we can use to develop tools.
It’s the money that we're operating off of is coming from people that are paying their water bills and their electric bills.
We love working with NASA supported research, because we can find the most efficient way to use those funds to protect source water, to treat our water, and to do all of our operations.
Maximizing the use of new modeling tools to track potential rainfall, predict debris flows, and allocate limited resources appropriately can be extremely beneficial to natural resource managers. Addressing post wildfire impacts. really takes a community and having their expertise and knowledge in partnership with NASA, helps us folks boots on the ground, make better decisions on how we manage these forested areas.
Here at NASA, we are helping communities protect their most valuable resources. Every pixel in our satellite images represents real people, real homes, and real lives.