Water Pollution Monitoring Using Remote Sensing

Abstract

It seems much difference on remote sensing images with different quality water. After analyzing the relative spectral reflectance of different quality water on TM images, we found that the relative spectral reflectance of band 1 to band 4 (R1, R2, R3 and R4) were sensitive to the different quality water. R2 will be greater than R1 (R2/R11) for high suspended sediment regions, in which, if the suspended sediment concentration is very high, R3 is greater than R2 (R3R2), otherwise R3R2. For contaminated water, the more serious the polluted water is, the higher value R4/R3 is. According to the water monitoring data from Environment Protect Bureau of Dongying City, the main pollutants of drainage system in Yellow River Delta are organic substances. So R4/R3 may be used as an important index of water organic pollution in the area. After numerous tries and comparisons, we found the average and standard deviation of R4/R3 may be used as a semi-quality index for water pollution classification. The mouth of Xiao-qing River was taken as an example to test the above rules and its water pollution distributions were got from TM images in different years. The regions with high suspended sediment and serious polluted water can be extracted from TM images using the method introduced above. And the method has some references for water monitoring with large area.