Space Apps Challenge 2017

WaterSearch | Where's the Water?

Everywhere / Virtual Participation

Project

The Challenge | Where's the Water?

Use satellite and other data to allow farmers, landowners, and land managers in your locale to identify and visualize water resources in their surroundings.

Find my water

A user friendly web app to help users finding the nearest water surfaces to their location. It also shows other details such as water consumption and the percentage of people with access to water sources in the region

Aim:

To find the nearest water source near a user and find data related to water in the region

Method:

For finding the nearest waterbody to a user, we used Google Maps' elevation API to locate places within 111km of the user's location which were below sea level. Using this method we can locate water bodies who tend to lie below 0m.

This part of the challenge took longer as we attempted several methods ranging from reverse geo coding to iterating through pixels in a map's image and to look for a colour relating to water and then scaling it to the actual map.

None of these methods were successful as reverse geocoding ended up not showing oceans as water bodies! On the other hand, iterating through pixels in an image was unsuccesful as adding an image to the canvas blurred the image which would affect the final result.

In the end we relied on elevation to locate water bodies.

The second part of out project was finding data pertaining to water in the user's region, specifically the percentage of population with access to a water source and the total water usage per capita in that region.

Main Resources:

Final Project

Project: https://free-basket.glitch.me/

Github repo: https://github.com/BenRitmicoCode/SpaceApps/tree/master

Code: https://glitch.com/edit/#!/free-basket

SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.