Gybe

Gybe watches water quality by combining its own in-water sensors with satellite imagery, giving water managers a live view of an entire watershed rather than a handful of points. The way this is done today is that someone drives out, fills a bottle, and takes it to a lab, and the answer comes back a week later describing a place and a moment that no longer exist.

So the response is always reactive: a bloom is discovered once it's visible, a contamination once it's downstream. Water systems are getting less predictable, under warming temperatures, heavier rain, and more runoff, exactly when the data behind them is at its thinnest. Seeing the whole watershed continuously means intervening while an intervention is still small and cheap. The satellites have been overhead the entire time. What was missing was the ground truth to calibrate them against.