The Challenge: aging water infrastructure

Centralized water systems are aging in the United States and in many parts of the world, and rainwater harvesting (RWH) hasn’t been seriously considered as an alternative to this problem. Our solution arose out of a need to develop planning tools to catalyze the shift  from centralized water distribution systems to a more localized, decentralized network. SkyHarvester provides urban planners and individuals a way to assess the benefits of implementing RWH solutions, and therefore decide if harvesting rainwater is a viable option to expand their water supply

 

While RWH tools already exist, SkyHarvester looks at the problem from a regional perspective, seeing the wide-scale potential of RWH as a water resource, similar to the way that solar/wind energy are disrupting the standard electricity grid. Our use of gridded precipitation data led us to create a novel deconvolution algorithm for gridded datasets that increased the accuracy of our calculations.