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.