A novel approach for surface water quality modelling based on Landsat-8 tasselled cap transformation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Updating the physicochemical properties of surface water is important to water quality researchers and decision-makers. Routine surface water quality monitoring methods are inadequate; whereas, remote sensing (RS) is a source of processing data in both spatial and temporal domains. However, RS is a good tool of monitoring freshwater ecosystems, accurate modelling of surface water quality parameters from satellite imagery is still a challenging task. High correlation between the adjacent satellite signals, which creates redundancy, is one of the main challenges that negatively affect the stability of the developed models. Therefore, this paper focuses on the development of a novel approach for modelling concentrations of both turbidity (T) and total suspended solids (TSS) using Landsat-8 tasselled cap transformation (TCT). As a result, robust models were developed between measurements from satellite-derived T and TSS and in situ measurements with coefficient of determination values of 0.854 and 0.812, respectively. These findings confirmed the possibility of using TCT to establish strong models for assessing surface water quality due to its capability of transforming a set of correlated data onto a convenient set of uncorrelated data, which maintain the major information associated with a physical phenomenon.