From images to insights

– advancing sustainable water management

Water quality monitoring is critical for sustainable food production, but traditional methods often fall short of providing timely and large-scale insights. Within the Unity4Water project, Nornio is leveraging cutting-edge technology to tackle this challenge as one of the partners, helping to make water reuse safer and more efficient.

At the heart of Nornio’s work is the use of multispectral imaging to analyze water quality. This technology enables the detection of key indicators, such as nutrient levels or pollutants, by examining how water interacts with different wavelengths of light.

– By analyzing multispectral images, we can create indices that act as indicators for specific parameters in the water. This approach allows us to assess water quality in a sustainable and efficient way, without the need for invasive sampling, explains Ola Bratt, founder of Nornio.

Navigating real-world challenges
Developing these methods hasn’t been without its difficulties. Monitoring water quality in natural environments introduces a range of variables, including sunlight, reflections, and shadows, all of which can interfere with the accuracy of the images.

– One of the biggest challenges has been calibrating images outside of a controlled laboratory environment. External factors, like reflections from the sun or surrounding objects, can create uncertainties in the data. We are working on robust calibration methods that account for these disturbances and still provide reliable measurements, says Ola Bratt.

Innovations that set the standard
Despite these challenges, Nornio has already made significant progress. A key breakthrough has been the development of methods to generate proxy values for water quality from multispectral imagery, offering a scalable and less resource-intensive way to assess water health.

– This is something we are particularly proud of, shares Bratt and continues:

– It’s a solid foundation for future innovation and demonstrates the potential of remote sensing in water quality monitoring. We’ve learned that water quality can be assessed in many ways, and each method has its advantages depending on the context. This adaptability is crucial for creating sustainable solutions, and it’s something we’re taking forward into future projects.

A vision for long-term sustainability
Unity4Water’s mission is to innovate water management through collaboration and technology, and Nornio’s contributions are central to this effort. Their advancements in remote sensing and image analysis are paving the way for smarter, more scalable water monitoring solutions that will benefit food production and environmental sustainability alike. They see enormous potential for applying these methods on a larger scale, and they’re excited to continue developing this technology for broader use in sustainability.

With partners like Nornio, Unity4Water is shaping the future of water quality monitoring, proving that innovation and collaboration can transform even the most complex challenges into actionable solutions.