Coastal Services Center

Coastal Water Quality

Coastal waters are influenced by both oceanic and terrestrial processes. However, the time and space scales at which these processes operate are typically too fast to be observed by ship-based sampling and too small for most satellite sampling. The Coastal Water Quality project at the NOAA Coastal Services Center is investigating the complex nature of the impacts of terrestrial land management practices on coastal water quality and the capability of remote sensing to monitor and measure those impacts.

Using remote sensing in shallow coastal waters can pose problems. The water bodies are frequently too small for 1-kilometer-pixel satellite data to be useful. And if higher-resolution imagery can be obtained, the ocean color algorithms developed for open-ocean satellites generally are problematic because of the variety of sediments, submerged aquatic vegetation, phytoplankton, and dissolved material that affect the color of coastal waters and thus the calculation of parameters within the water column. Even if the algorithms are useful, processing a raw satellite image into a user-friendly geographic information system (GIS) data product can require too much time, equipment, and expertise for some management purposes.

The Coastal Water Quality project is working with partners to investigate new techniques for using remote sensing to collect water quality data that address some of these problems. This project focuses on the parameters of chlorophyll, suspended sediments, and sea surface temperature, which are priorities of the coastal management community that can be reliably measured with currently available remote sensing technology.