River flow forecasts through virtual stations is what BWI can do for you

BWI drives climate resilience for public authorities and businesses through digitizing river basins. By providing world-scale hydrological forecasts, BWI empowers clients to deploy virtual stations across their watersheds, capable today of monitoring and predicting river discharge and water levels. Tomorrow, BWI’s capabilities will extend further, as BWI aims to forecast continental freshwater reservoir volumes, and water quality too.

Why BWI?

2.3 billion and counting

More than 2.3 billion people are facing water stress and almost 160 million children have been through severe and prolonged droughts. Hence, monitoring and predicting water resources and hazards has become key to human life, to political stability, to economic activity.

1% of total water is continental freshwater

Nearly 97% of the world’s water is salty or otherwise undrinkable while ice caps and glaciers contain another 2%. Therefore, that leaves just 1% for all of humanity’s needs — all its agricultural, residential, manufacturing, community, and personal needs.

Hydrological forecasting on top of near real-time continental freshwater monitoring

There is an inextricable link between water and climate change. Since global warming affects the world’s water resources in a complex way, looking at past water reserves data, streamflow data or water quality data isn’t enough. Technology is now sufficiently mature to look at the future and anticipate. Policy makers and corporate decision-makers can now make use of AI-powered tools for improved predictions of water levels, water discharge, water reservoir volumes, water quality and hydro-climatic disasters such as floods and droughts.

What is BWI about?

Freshwater data & insights for climate resilience through hydrological virtual stations

Climate change is exacerbating both water scarcity and water hazards – such as floods, droughts, and water pollution, as rising temperatures disrupt precipitation patterns and the entire water cycle. Therefore, it is important to do our best to augment climate resilience. BWI subscribers benefit from predictions processed based dozens of data sources – such as space sensors, weather radars, and other ground sensors. BWI also strives to launch a constellation dedicated to monitoring continental freshwater levels at all major basins worldwide. A daily global inland water availability monitoring will help quantify the impact of climate change on water resources.

River flow forecasts are necessary to anticipate water hazards such as floods, droughts and water pollution

Water is critical to life. In the next decades, population growth is expected to amplify the already tremendous pressure on water resources while global warming generates more and more extreme hydro-climatic events such as floods, heat waves and droughts, which are mainly affecting the most vulnerable populations. Taking into account the accelerating effects of climate change on water stress is the reason BWI reinforces hydraulic and hydrological models with deep learning, so clients are delivered with state-of-the-art flood and drought forecasts.

BWI forecasts river flow

River discharge forecasts for run-of-river hydropower plants and hydroelectricity traders

River flow monitoring and forecasts through hydrological virtual stations to enhance small hydro assets performance and hydroelectricity day-ahead trading.

Watershed digitization for public authorities

River basin digitization to forecast water levels, river flow, water quality and to provide stakeholders with early warning tools and information about water availability via hydrological virtual stations.

Hydrological forecasts for insurance, risk management and analytics

All-things-continental-freshwater API to expose high-accuracy hydrological forecasts to risk managers, actuaries, and disaster prevention specialists.

High-revisit altimetry space constellation

At least 30.000 global water level measurement points updated everyday will be made available via an API.

Hydrological monitoring and forecasting for irrigation and agri-food industries

River flow forecasts to help agriculture, fishery and the food and beverage industry to preserve ecosystems by securing biological and reserved flows.

Who are BWI riverflow forecast services for?

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Public authorities

Governments, municipalities and basin managers, are in need of accurate water levels, river discharge, water quality, water hazards forecasting.
  • $9.8 trillion of economic activity, about 12% of global GDP, in areas exposed to severe flooding.
  • 12 million hectares of land lost annually to drought and desertification. Thus, the impact of natural disasters is immense!

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Blue Water Intelligence (BWI) provides a set of subscription-based services to help governments better predict water hazards to warn populations early, and therefore save lives and protect jobs in case of a drought or of a flood. 

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Water-sensitive companies

Water utilities, risk managers, energy producers, food & beverage,… leverage water-related predictions and data to level up.

Water hazards have a direct impact on the state of the world economy:

  • Spain’s hydroelectricity production in 2022 was 48% inferior to the country’s hydroelectricity production in 2021.
  • Floods cause more than $40 billion in damage worldwide annually.
  • In Brazil, coffee production is expected to fall 23% in 2022 due to lack of water resources.
  • In the US, drought-induced crop failures and other economic losses have totalled $249 billion since 1980.

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Hydro-climatic events, river flow, water levels and water quality can be predicted: this is where Blue WaterIntelligence comes in and delivers valuable forecasts to its clients.

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IFIs & NGOs

Many cross-border conflicts are caused by disputes over water resources, which could be prevented with more appropriate water prediction services.

Floods impact 23% of the world population. Out of which, 90% live in lower or middle income countries where international donors and NGOs concentrate their activity.

Building critical infrastructure in flood-safe areas and other infrastructures with future predictions makes the intervention of international donors and NGOs key to environmental, social and economic recovery.

As far as water stress is concerned, since 2000, droughts have affected around 1.5 billion people , which led to economic losses of $124 billion. International institutions have begun to arbitrage geopolitical conflicts as more and more cross-border disputes are water-stress related.

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Thus, BWI services including flood forecasts may help international financial institutions, donors and NGOs make the best possible peacemaking and rebuilding decisions.

BWI website is low carbon

Did you know that the Internet also contributes to climate change? Have you ever heard of greenhouse gas emissions generated by your online activity?

Using your computer, browsing the Internet with your smartphone, consume energy, via thousands of cables and computers that run permanently in data centers, and also because greenhouse gas have been necessary to manufacture and ship these devices.

At BWI, we’ve applied eco-design practices to this website because of our goal to minimize its carbon footprint.

-The code has been optimized to be generated quickly and with the minimum possible resources.
-Compressed Images.
-Limited CSS styles.
-Few plugins are used to avoid loading useless libraries.

Each visit to this website generates about 0.41g of eCO2. That’s still too much, but we’re working on mitigating these carbon emissions further.

BWI is also a Planet Tech’Care signatory.