Water Chlorophyll Estimation in an Urban Canal System With High-Resolution Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Water quality, which is a key concern associated with large-scale canal operation and management, is vulnerable to the influences from short-term weather variations and artificial activities. Chlorophyll is one of the key indicators to measure the water quality and usability for drinking and irrigation in the canal system. However, previous research designed the state-of-the-art algorithms regarding water chlorophyll estimation using medium-resolution remote sensing data (e.g., Landsat), which has insufficient resolution to capture canals that are usually narrower than one pixel in such data. High-resolution imageries covering the whole canal network might include only either visible wavebands (i.e., red, green, blue bands) or cost thousands of dollars for an effective investigation on real-time water chlorophyll monitoring. Thus, the strategy designed for water chlorophyll analysis in a canal should consider an appropriate tradeoff among spatial resolution, the spectrum helpful for chlorophyll detection, and the financial burden. This letter presents our efforts on identifying and assessing the extent of the Planet data for measuring chlorophyll degree of canal waters. The experiments show that although Planet can represent the relative variation in water chlorophyll concentration, new algorithms are still necessary for accurate results regarding water chlorophyll variations in a canal system.