Monitoring of spatial water quality in lakes by remote sensing and transect measurements

Abstract

New tools, such as intensive measurements, together with advanced mathematical models, are increasingly needed in water management and environmental research. The new approaches are being developed at Pyhäjärvi, a large (155 km²) lake in southwest Finland. Pyhäjärvi is highly valuable in terms of water supply, fisheries and recreational use. The ecological state of Pyhäjärvi has been closely monitored for decades, particularly since eutrophication became a major concern in the late 1980s. Two relatively new research methods were used to assess the spatial water quality of Pyhäjärvi: (i) transect measurements from a moving boat; and (ii) remote sensing data based estimates. First, a flow-through method from a moving boat was successfully used to collect high resolution transect water quality data from the lake over six field campaigns. The method is relatively accurate but costly, and its use is mostly limited to special campaigns and intensive research, but not for long-term monitoring. Second, remote sensing methods were used to retrieve water quality information which was found consistent with the surface measurements from the boat. The estimation of parameters such as turbidity and humic substance concentration is possible with simple algorithms when using remote sensing (MERIS) data. The quantitative estimation of water quality by the methods used here requires concurrent in situ measurements for algorithm training. These methods will be further developed utilizing frequent on-line water quality and weather data from a recently installed lake float.

Keywords:

• eutrophication
• MERIS instrument
• large lake
• turbidity
• humic substances
• cyanobacterial biomass

Acknowledgements

Financial support from Tekes (Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation) to the CatchLake project is acknowledged.

Eu REFRESH project (FP7-ENV-2009-1/244121) is also acknowledged, supporting the finishing phase of this paper.