1. A cooling tower monitoring system comprising: a memory comprising computer instructions; and a processor coupled to the memory, wherein, when executing the computer instructions, the processor effectuates operations comprising: receiving at least one measurement from a cooling tower sensor; generating a predicted output of a cooling tower system based on a model of the cooling tower system; and generating an estimated output using an extended Kalman filter with the at least one measurement and the predicted output as inputs, wherein the estimated output represents a characteristic of the cooling tower system.