Frazer-Nash Consultancy has been named ‘Challenge Champion’ for Deloitte’s flagship space innovation program, the GRAVITY Challenge in its special edition round - GRAVITY 08: AquaWatch-AUK which aimed to find solutions for some of the world’s most pressing water quality challenges across inland and coastal environments.
Over the past eight weeks, the Frazer-Nash team has worked closely with Melbourne Water to co-design bespoke solutions that harness ground-to-space monitoring to build an integrated system to trace, model, and predict water quality degradation and pollutant risks from catchments to coast.
We are very pleased to say that our proposed solution, SHIELD-E² - a system for hazard identification, early warning, and location detection of E. coli and enterococci – saw our team take out top spot as Challenge Champion.
A first-of-its-kind system, SHIELD-E² is designed to improve the way microbial contamination events are detected and managed in waterways. Spikes of E. coli and enterococci threaten public health, impose negative social, economic, environmental and reputational impacts, and damage community trust.
Anthony Kwong, Technical Director, said: “Current monitoring for E. coli and enterococci involves in-situ sampling that is both spatially and temporally limited. SHIELD-E² integrates satellite imagery, in-situ data, and machine learning to provide catchment-to-coast monitoring and forecasting capabilities to overcome these limitations.”
Using publicly available Sentinel-2 data, SHIELD-E² identifies contamination events and predicts plume movement from rivers into Australia’s Port Phillip Bay, with early results showing over 80% monitoring accuracy, validated against EPA datasets for E.coli and enterococci sample readings from Melbourne Water.
Anthony said: “Our achievements through the Gravity Challenge have demonstrated significant potential for proactive interventions and management of microbial contaminations. Huge credit goes to Queenie Wang, Lachlan Rolley and Scott Muston for their out-of-the-box thinking to come up with this incredible solution for Melbourne Water.”
Using ground-to-space monitoring, Deloitte’s GRAVITY Challenge highlighted the important role space technology plays in sustainable development and environmental stewardship all over the world.
To see more about our challenge winning solution, watch this video: FNC Finale on Vimeo
