Description: Learn how satellite remote sensing and high-performance computing are being used to build a comprehensive water quality database for 30,000+ lakes across the Upper Midwest and Lower New England, enabling advanced geospatial and temporal analysis to support data-driven lake management and regional water quality insights.

Author: Leif Olmanson (University of Minnesota)*

Author Bio: Leif Olmanson is a Research Scientist at the University of Minnesota with 30 years of experience developing remote sensing applications. His work focuses on creating temporally and spatially rigorous datasets for characterizing large-area ecosystems, specifically water and land resources. He is particularly interested in developing field-validated image processing methods implemented in automated geospatial analysis systems such as Google Earth Engine and the supercomputers at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.

Olmanson leads a team of researchers and computer scientists dedicated to building a system for near real-time monitoring of water quality and surface temperature for Minnesota’s more than 10,000 lakes. The system uses satellite imagery to provide essential information on water quality and temperature, which is crucial for lake and fisheries management. Recently, the system has been expanded to cover regions in the Upper Midwest and Lower New England states. You can explore and visualize the data using the Minnesota LakeBrowser (https://lakes.rs.umn.edu/).