Water
Water: rivers, floods, coasts, oceans and the supply and quality of water.
stories
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Water reaches one substation; water pumping and communications can go down with it.
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Scrolling story and playable water-allocation model of the Colorado River basin by Anselm Hook; readers set the flow, choose the cut rule and retire irrigation, then share the future they built as a link.
tools
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Open-source Python library by James Adams that computes drought, fire and flood-potential indices such as SPI, SPEI, the Palmer family and KBDI from station or gridded precipitation and temperature.
Weather & climateWaterFire open source
Open single-class fish detector built by Filippo Varini and a group of contributors, trained on seventeen open datasets pooled into one; finds fish in underwater images and video from any camera or habitat.
Living systemsWater open sourceopen dataopen participation
Open-source pipeline from EPFL's ECEO lab that turns handheld underwater video of coral reefs into labelled 3D point clouds, orthomosaics and benthic cover statistics.
Living systemsWater open source
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Feature of Deltares' Delft-FEWS forecasting platform, from version 2026.02, that pulls Google Flood Hub river forecasts and flood status through Google's Flood Forecasting API so forecasters can compare them with their own models and observations.
Deltares' Delft3D FM Suite models water flow, transport of matter and morphology in coastal, estuarine and river environments.
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Project hosted at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to build digital twins of coral reefs, so that the people who manage, conserve and restore reefs can explore a reef in 3D over time and test management options; a low-fidelity prototype exists.
Molecular atlas that links microbial genes and transcripts from wetland and coastal sediments to field measurements of methane, nitrous oxide and sulfur, as evidence for blue-carbon projects; contacts are at Ecosphere Blue, whose MethaNet product is built on it.
Living systemsWaterWeather & climate partly open data
Google's family of geospatial AI models and agents, covering satellite imagery, weather, floods and population, reached through Google Earth, Earth Engine, BigQuery, Maps Platform and Google Cloud.
Cities & placesPeople & societyWeather & climateWaterEnergy partly open sourcepartly open dataAPI
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Free public site from Google Research with riverine flood forecasts, flood maps and water trends for river basins in over 150 countries, updated daily; the same forecasts reach Search, Maps and Android and can be pulled by API.
WaterWeather & climate partly open sourceopen dataAPI
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AI weather model from Schmitt, Jain and co-authors that retrains ECMWF's AIFS on satellite precipitation observations to forecast rain more accurately at the local scale.
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Ecosphere Blue's planned assessment service for blue-carbon projects, rating project performance with methane-risk projections drawn from microbial genomic evidence in mangrove sediment.
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Google Research's open-source hydrology framework, a Python package that replicates the LSTM river-flow models behind Flood Hub so forecasters can train or fine-tune them on their own watersheds.
Water open source
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Real-time underwater SLAM from the University of Michigan field robotics group that fuses learned stereo depth with IMU, pressure and Doppler velocity log measurements; developed and tested on shipwreck surveys.
WaterSensory landscape partly open sourceopen data
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Caribbean project testing whether dense restored stands of elkhorn coral reduce wave energy and sediment movement along coasts, with sites in Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua & Barbuda; funded by the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund.
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Robotic surface vehicle from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, built by Peter Traykovski and adapted for Anne Cohen's reef work, that photographs shallow coral reefs along GPS-tagged tracks so the same colonies can be checked again after each heat wave.
digital twins
A layered portrait of San Francisco Bay that explains a digital twin as four shared geographic layers: earth and seabed, natural forces, living systems and the built world.
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The Chesapeake Bay Program's web-based watershed model of the Chesapeake Bay, United States; a planner picks an area and management practices and it estimates the resulting nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment loads and their cost.
WaterLiving systems open datapartly open participation
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A modelling and monitoring system for the Great Barrier Reef built by CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Queensland Government with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation; it simulates water movement, sediment, waves and biogeochemistry from the catchments to the open ocean.
WaterLiving systems open sourceopen dataAPI
The European Commission's digital replica of the ocean, built and run by Mercator Ocean International and the Flanders Marine Institute; a public platform that joins Copernicus Marine and EMODnet data with ocean models and what-if scenario applications.
WaterLiving systemsWeather & climate open dataopen participation
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A Horizon 2020 project of 56 partners that builds virtual representations of the sea from earth observation, models and digital infrastructure, and runs a marketplace where digital twins, models and their components are listed and shared.
WaterLiving systems partly open datapartly open participation
terms
The idea that a bioregion should be organised around the relationships that sustain life in a place, such as a shared water system, rather than around a boundary drawn on a map; argued by Indy Johar and related to the rights-of-nature movement for rivers.
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Framework from the ecological design firm Biohabitats for asking, before a data center is designed, whether it belongs in a landscape at all, and how it relates to the watershed, habitat and community around it.
data sources
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Climate Change Institute, University of Maine. Daily charts and day-of-year data for global and regional sea surface temperature, 2 m air temperature and sea ice extent, drawn from NOAA OISST and ECMWF ERA5.
Weather & climateWater open data
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National Snow and Ice Data Center's running record of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent and concentration, daily and monthly, from November 1978 to the present. Version 4.
Weather & climateWater open data
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organizations
Coastal Assembly, a public benefit company out of MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, models how sand moves along a shoreline from satellite, wave, current and seabed data, then places engineered reef structures so that waves rebuild the beach.
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Platform from Blue Green Future and Global Resilience Partners that helps governments count living nature as part of sovereign wealth; Tonga and Panama are its first partner countries.
questions
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Which areas will flood, how often, and what would a change to a river, a drain or a pump do about it?
articles
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Paper in Science Advances led by Climate Central, by Daniel M. Gilford, Yucheng Lin, Kristina Dahl, Andrew J. Pershing, Robert E. Kopp and Benjamin H. Strauss, that estimates how much of the rise in extreme water levels at 519 tide gauges worldwide is due to human-caused sea level rise.
- Mapping coastal forest retreat using convolutional neural networks and different satellite imagery article draft
2026 PLOS One paper by Titilayo Tajudeen and colleagues at North Carolina State University that classifies Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery with convolutional neural networks to track forest turning into ghost forest and marsh on the North Carolina coastal plain between 1985 and 2021.
- Sea-level contribution from Thwaites Glacier doubles in an observation-constrained ice-sheet model article draft
Paper in Nature Communications by Mattia Poinelli, Eric Rignot, Hélène Seroussi and colleagues that calibrates the ISSM ice-sheet model of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica, to observations from 1996 to 2023 and runs it forward to 2100.
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Annual update of sixteen planetary vital signs by William Ripple, Christopher Wolf and colleagues in BioScience; in 2026 seven of the sixteen are at record extremes.
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Recent reports, from a creek in Kentucky to the Strait of Hormuz, each read for the question someone there would put to a model of their place, and the kind of model that would answer it.
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Explainer from the Copernicus Marine Service on how ocean forecasts are made: observations fed into physics-based models, data assimilation, and machine learning for gap-filling, sea ice reconstruction and marine heatwave detection.
events
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Scenario session at the Public Vitality Camp Berlin 2026, moderated by Dark Matter Labs, BiberAmt Berlin and nextlearning e.V., on governing the Berlin–Brandenburg water system across jurisdictions using measures from Berlin's Masterplan Wasser.
sections
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Six running measurements of the planet's state, refreshed from their sources at every deploy.
Symbol: "river" by Creative Mahira, Noun Project, CC BY 3.0.