Early Algal Warning System

Finalist of the 2020 Victorian Premier Design Awards, Digital Design

Tim Malthus (O&A) initiated an eResearch collaboration with the visualisation team to develop a frontend module for water quality. The data sets are gathered from LANDSAT 7 and LANDSAT 8 satellites, computed using the Australian Geoscience Data Cube (AGDC) on the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), performed by Eric Lehmann (D61). The aim of this project is to provide an easy to use interface for policy makers and water authorities to better make judgements about water allocation.

Features

State-of-the-art HTML5 infrastructure supporting all modern desktop browsers.
Lake statuses are updated in real-time as data become available
Search over 2000 lake bodies in New South Wales
Historical trends up to whenever we have data (currently up to 18 months prior)
Per-pixel query for lake trends in addition to average trends for inspection
Street map vs satellite views to better discerning locations for water issues
At a glance state-wide view of major lake statuses
Export average lake trends for reporting

Design

The frontend exists as a modular webpage, which can be embedded into another website, or hosted on its own. The main area is an interactive map view that offers zoom, search, and querying into lakes. On the right, lakes can be filtered by name, and they link to individual lake overlays. Images are designed to follow the "traffic light" red-amber-green status for intuitive severity understanding.

When a lake is selected, a trend chart pops up on the bottom right. It offers a draggable timeline to display the intended time slice, as well as a downloadable export link for reporting. The unit, TSM, is an experimental measurement at the time of writing, and does not actually reflect the algae activity of the lake.