BACKGROUND: Complex Systems Research Center (CSRC) at the University of New Hampshire is helping coastal managers and watershed associations monitor groundwater discharge into coastal environments. Measuring this phenomenon is important since groundwater discharge often contributes more contaminant loading than surface waters, and has historically been difficult to quantify. CSRC needed an automated tool to analyze, delineate and catalog these discharge areas, whose thermal signatures are visible in panchromatic infrared imagery. The tool would be distributed to researchers and volunteers, allowing them to quickly process the thermal IR imagery and subsequently estimate the extent of the groundwater discharge and contaminant loading.