Advancing Technology For The Water Industry

About this event

The American Water Resources Association National Capital Region Section (AWRA-NCRS) invites you for expert presentations and discussion on advancing technology for the water industry delivered by speakers from NASA, SSAI and NOAA. Learn how NASA leverages satellite observations to monitor Earth’s atmosphere, water, ice, land, and biological systems. Explore how these data are managed and transformed through advanced software and modeling tools to assess and forecast the impacts of climate change and human activities on water resources.

Speakers:

Presentation Topic: Satellite-based Tool for Rapid Evaluation of Aquatic EnvironMents (STREAM)

William Wainwright is a Scientific Programmer with the Freshwater Sensing group at Science Systems and Applications Inc. (SSAI) and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). William graduated with a Masters in Astrophysics from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 2022 before applying his programming and data science skills in the Earth Science domain. He is the architect and end-to-end developer of STREAM, a NASA remote sensing water quality monitoring portal that uses Landsat 8/9 and Sentinel-2 data to deliver near-real time water quality maps across the entire US.

STREAM is an interactive online portal that provides rapid, web-based visualization and seamless data access for satellite-derived water quality products. The portal currently supports multi-sensor data streams from the Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) and the Landsat-8/9 Operational Land Imager (OLI). Beyond enabling quick visualization of WQ parameters, STREAM includes robust tools for generating and analyzing historical time-series for all supported products.

Praveen Bahethi is the President of Science Systems and Applications, Inc. (SSAI), a technology and scientific services company headquartered in Lanham, Maryland. Praveen is a personable and driven executive with a background in managing technology firms of various sizes across many industries. In 2021, he became SSAI’s president and he desires to return the company to its focus: scientific and engineering innovation. Praveen has an eye for efficiency and productivity and is committed to furthering his parents’ vision of working to improve the quality of life today and into the future.

Presentation Topic: AQUAtic coastal InVERsion SchemE for remote sensing of fresh and coastal waters (AQUAVERSE)

Arun M. Saranathan is a Senior Research Scientist at Science Systems and Applications, Inc. (SSAI), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Arun has a Ph.D., Electrical Engineering from UMass Amherst and specializes in the adaptation of techniques from signal processing, machine learning, and computer vision for the automated analysis of remotely sensed data—primarily multispectral and hyperspectral imagery. At the Freshwater Sensing Group, his primary focus is on developing and maintaining machine learning codebases to enhance water quality (WQ) monitoring using optical remote sensing data. He is also involved in projects focused on time-series forecasting of various WQ and hydrological variables.

AQUAVERSE is an end-to-end processing framework designed to translate satellite-derived optical data into actionable Water Quality (WQ) maps. The system leverages Mixture Density Networks (MDNs)—a powerful machine learning architecture—to simultaneously handle atmospheric/aerosol correction and translate optical observations directly into key water quality parameters.

Presentation Topic : Technologies Used to Issue Flood Watches, Warnings, and Advisories

Kyle J Pallozzi – Meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Kyle has been a Meteorologist at NWS Baltimore/Washington since 2018. Prior to that, he obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Atmospheric Science from the University at Albany. He originally hails from Upstate New York, enjoys playing basketball in his free time, and always appreciates a good snowstorm or thunderstorm.

Registration: Click HERE to register for the event. Lunch will be provided. Registration deadline : Nov 2,2026 Registration fee : $15 for members / $25 for non-members / $5 for students

Meeting day details :

Meeting room: 6th Floor. Registration starts at 11am ET. Free parking at venue.