Abstract
Water quality information in the coastal region of Hong Kong and the Pearl River Estuary (PRE) is of great concern to the local community. Due to great landuse-landcover (LULC) changes with rapid industrialization and urbanization in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, water quality in the PRE has worsened during the last 20 years. Frequent red tide and harmful algal blooms have occurred in the estuary and its adjacent coastal waters since the 1980s and have caused important economic losses, also possibly threatening to the coastal environment, fishery, and public health in Hong Kong. In addition, recent literature shows that water nutrients in Victoria Harbor of Hong Kong have been proven to be strongly influenced by both the Pearl River and sewage effluent in the wet season (May to September), but it is still unclear how the PRE diluted water intrudes into Victoria Harbor. Due to the cloudy and rainy conditions in the wet season in Hong Kong, ASAR images will be used to monitor the PRE river plumes and track the intruding routes of PRE water nutrients. In this paper, we first review LULC change in the PRD and then show our preliminary results to analyze water quality spatial and temporal information from remote observations with different sensors in the coastal region and estuary. The study will also emphasizes on time series of analysis of LULC trends related to annual sediment yields and critical source areas of erosion for the PRD region since the 1980s.
Highlights
Remote sensing technique is a valuable tool to obtain information about processes that take place on the surface of waters [1,2]
Several studies have addressed the importance of accurately acquiring the information of water components for water quality monitoring by using remote sensing
These studies show that the spatial distribution of nutrients, phytoplankton biomass, and dissolved oxygen is highly related to the Pearl River Estuary (PRE) dynamic interaction with adjacent coastal waters [19,20], and indicate that water nutrients in Hong Kong’s
Summary
Remote sensing technique is a valuable tool to obtain information about processes that take place on the surface of waters [1,2]. One major advantage of satellite remote sensing observations over traditional measurements of water quality monitoring is that they provide both spatial and temporal data of surface water characteristics. A series of studies on SPM around the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico have been done [9,10,11], and satellite remote sensing of ocean color has been used to study coastal processes such as spatial and temporal variability of SPM around this area, as well as in the Urdaibai Estuary of Spain [12]. The distribution of water quality levels from the CPI calculation was retrieved from SeaWiFs water-leaving radiance [18] These studies show that the spatial distribution of nutrients, phytoplankton biomass, and dissolved oxygen is highly related to the PRE dynamic interaction with adjacent coastal waters [19,20], and indicate that water nutrients in Hong Kong’s.
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