NV5 awarded $3M to support water conservation in the Western US

June 1, 2020
Funding from NASA and the California Department of Water Resources asks Quantum Spatial to provide remote sensing services.

HOLLYWOOD, FL -- NV5 Global, Inc. (the “Company” or “NV5”) (Nasdaq: NVEE), a provider of professional and technical engineering, geospatial, and consulting solutions, announced today that Quantum Spatial, Inc. (“Quantum Spatial”), an NV5 company, has been awarded two contracts totaling $3 million by NASA and the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) to provide remote sensing services in the Western United States. 

The first is a $900,000 project to evaluate high-accuracy lidar and hyperspectral imaging in Colorado and Idaho for the NASA SnowEx 2020 campaign, which is evaluating technologies for measuring snowpack and corresponding snow water equivalency (SWE) in a variety of ecosystems.

The second, a $2 million contract expansion from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), focuses on providing additional remote sensing and analytics services to support water conservation efforts across more than 400 water districts in the state.

“We are pleased with the performance of Quantum Spatial as it continues to secure new contracts and deliver innovative approaches to extract the power of geospatial data for clients in the public and quasi-public sectors,” said Dickerson Wright, PE, chairman and CEO of NV5. “Water management is an important global issue, particularly in the western United States, and we are proud to contribute to water conservation and intelligent water use efforts.”

SnowEx 2020 Campaign
The SnowEx 2020 campaign is a research effort funded by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in partnership with Boise State University (BSU). Quantum Spatial was tasked with acquiring airborne lidar and hyperspectral data at peak snowpack and during snow-free conditions, to support the overall research of measuring depth, surface temperature, cover, and surface condition in support of the SWE component of the SnowEx 2020 campaign.

ASA and its partners are testing a variety of sensors, including lidar, optical cameras, thermal infrared radiometers and hyperspectral imagers, across different terrains, vegetation and snow conditions in Colorado and Idaho to determine when and where each technology performs best. 

“Our project supporting NASA's SnowEx has broad, global implications since, according to NASA, more than one-sixth of the world's population rely on seasonal snowpack and glaciers for the water supply," said Steve Raber, senior program manager at Quantum Spatial. "We are honored to play an important role in this scientific research, which will expand the understanding of SWE."

California Department of Water Resources
Since 2017, Quantum Spatial has worked with the California DWR's Water Use and Efficiency Branch for statewide data collection that will help more than 400 water districts in the state assess water usage and ultimately help with conservation efforts in the future.

In the current phase of this project, Quantum Spatial is conducting a landscape analysis across 16,000 square miles of urban residential areas in California. The company is delineating irrigated and irrigable areas that, when combined with climate data, can provide the basis for fair and equitable water allocations to individual districts.

The expansion to its contract extends Quantum Spatial's work into the mapping of multi-family residential parcels and providing insights at the parcel level, in addition to district level summaries.

“Quantum Spatial's pioneering work in deploying state-of-the-art remote sensing tools and leveraging advanced analytics to gain insight from the data collected make it ideally suited for both the NASA SnowEx and DWR projects,” said Mark Abatto, president and COO of NV5 Geospatial Solutions.

SOURCE: Quantum Spatial, Inc.

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