Landsat’s Role in Managing Water Resources
Water is essential for life. A third of Earth’s populace has unreliable access to clean water. With current population growth and environmental trends, the U.N. Environmental Program estimates that 1.8 billion people will face water scarcity by 2025. Water means survival for people and other species we rely upon to thrive, making proper stewardship of our water resources vital. Good decisions require good data. Since 1972 the Landsat series of satellites has been providing such data. Landsat-based decisions on how to manage limited water resources have impacted millions of people worldwide. From finding water for refugees in arid nations to reducing pollution in our national waterways, Landsat enables decisions that directly help people.
![crop irrigation](https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/20180423_nu1.png)
Landsat Imagery Sheds Light on Agricultural Water Use
Researchers armed with data from the Landsat Earth-observing satellites recently teamed up with Google to track water used for irrigation.
![Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam](https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20180315_nu2-1024x640-1.png)
Land Under Water: Estimating Hydropower’s Land Use Impacts
A team of Norwegian-based researchers has developed an innovative way to describe how much land it takes to generate a kilowatt-hour of electricity from hydropower.
![Martha Anderson](https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Anderson.jpeg)
USGS Video: Landsat in Action—Monitoring Crop Land with Martha Anderson
Martha Anderson talks about the value of Landsat and its thermal data for understanding agricultural lands.
USGS Video: Landsat in Action—Minnesota Lakes with Leif Olmanson
Leif Olmanson talks about the value of Landsat data for monitoring the thousands of lakes in Minnesota.
UNESCO Launches a Pioneering Tool to Monitor Water Quality
Using data from Landsat and Sentinel-2, UNESCO is providing freshwater quality information at the global scale.
USGS Video: Landsat in Action—Tracking Water Changes with John Schott
John Schott discusses using Landsat Data over the years and how its thermal data tracks temperature changes in water bodies.