Country-scale water-leak detection from Sentinel-2
Water utilities lose 20–40% of treated water to pipeline leaks — billions in lost revenue and wasted resource every year. Satellite leak detection exists, but its coverage model has kept it to one-off studies rather than the continuous, network-wide service the problem demands.
Why resolution and coverage both matter
A typical leak signature is 2–8 m across. At native Sentinel-2's 10–20 m, that anomaly occupies a fraction of one pixel and is statistically indistinguishable from noise. At an enhanced 2 m it spans multiple pixels and becomes detectable through soil-moisture indices and temporal change.
The other constraint is economic. The only commercial service today relies on tasking SAR satellites — accurate per site, but unaffordable to run across an entire national pipeline network at the frequency proactive management needs.
A systematic, national-scale approach
Sentinel-2 provides systematic global coverage every 2–3 days with no tasking and no per-area pricing, which changes the unit economics: monitor a whole network on one schedule instead of paying per pass. Detection prioritises soil moisture — which responds within days of leak onset — using NDMI and MSAVI plus a multi-index fusion, with vegetation vigour as secondary confirmation.
Persistent anomalies along known pipeline routes, especially those uncorrelated with rainfall, generate high-confidence, geolocated alerts — delivered as a subscription with a country-wide baseline, continuous refresh, and confidence scoring.