CHIRPS
Free
Gauge-blended satellite rainfall at 0.05°, daily, since 1981 — the standard for drainage work in data-sparse regions.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveSatellite Precipitation DataRainfall Data
18 tools · Topic
Remote Sensing Tools for Water Resources
Satellites now observe surface water extent, soil moisture, snow, ET and even river discharge. Indexed here are the processing toolkits and access layers that turn those observations into engineering inputs — much of it free through Earth Engine and open archives.
Dynamic World
Free
Near-real-time 10m land cover from Google/WRI, updated every Sentinel-2 pass — land cover that keeps up.
Geospatial & Hydro-GISActiveLand Cover & Surface Water MappingGoogle Earth Engine
ESA WorldCover
Free
Global 10m land cover from Sentinel-1/2 — the highest-resolution free global land cover map available.
Geospatial & Hydro-GISActiveLand Cover & Surface Water MappingSCS Curve Number
GPM IMERG
Gov-Public
NASA's 30-minute, 0.1° global precipitation record — the highest time resolution of any satellite rainfall product.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveSatellite Precipitation DataRainfall Data
Google Earth Engine
Freemium
Planetary-scale geospatial analysis in the cloud — the data catalogue and compute behind modern water remote sensing.
Geospatial & Hydro-GISActiveGoogle Earth EngineRemote Sensing
JRC Global Surface Water
Gov-Public
Pixel-level surface water history since 1984, built from the entire Landsat archive — where water has been, and when.
Geospatial & Hydro-GISActiveLand Cover & Surface Water MappingFlood Mapping
MODIS ET (MOD16)
Gov-Public
Global actual ET from MODIS, 500m, 8-day/monthly/annual — a Penman-Monteith water-balance term, ready-made.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveEvapotranspirationRemote Sensing
MODIS LST
Gov-Public
1km daily/8-day land surface temperature from MODIS — the standard thermal input for energy-balance ET and snowmelt.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveLand Surface Temperature DataEvapotranspiration
MODIS Snow Cover
Gov-Public
500m daily/8-day global snow-cover extent from MODIS — the standard optical snow product for basin-scale tracking.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveSnow HydrologyRemote Sensing
Microsoft Planetary Computer
Freemium
A STAC API and Jupyter environment over petabytes of satellite data — Sentinel, Landsat, MODIS, ERA5, CHIRPS and more.
Geospatial & Hydro-GISActiveRemote SensingPython Hydrology
NASA Earthdata Search
Gov-Public
The unified search portal across every NASA Earth-observation archive — SRTM, MODIS, SMAP, GPM, GRACE and more.
Geospatial & Hydro-GISActiveRemote SensingSatellite DEM Data
NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit
Gov-Public
Free viewer and exporter for NEXRAD radar, satellite and climate data — out to GeoTIFF, Shapefile and NetCDF.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingStableRainfall DataRemote Sensing
PERSIANN-CDR
Free
A neural-network satellite rainfall climate data record, daily, 0.25°, purpose-built for long-term trend studies.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveSatellite Precipitation DataRainfall Data
SMAP
Gov-Public
NASA's L-band radiometer soil moisture mission — 9km/36km near-surface moisture, daily, since 2015.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveSatellite Soil Moisture DataDrought Analysis
SSEBop
Gov-Public
USGS operational ET at Landsat resolution — 30m actual evapotranspiration for water-rights and irrigation accounting.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveEvapotranspirationIrrigation
Sentinel-2
Free
Free 10-20m multispectral imagery, 5-day revisit — the imagery backbone under WorldCover and Dynamic World.
Geospatial & Hydro-GISActiveVegetation Index DataFlood Mapping
geemap
Open Source
Python + Google Earth Engine without the pain — interactive mapping and analysis of petabyte-scale water data.
Geospatial & Hydro-GISActiveGoogle Earth EngineRemote Sensing
wradlib
Open Source
The open library for weather-radar rainfall processing — from raw volumes to engineering-ready rainfall fields.
Data, Monitoring & ForecastingActiveRainfall DataRemote Sensing