Empirical relationships for monitoring water quality of lakes and reservoirs through multispectral images

Remote sensing techniques can be used to estimate water quality variables such as chlorophyll ${\mbi a}$ , total suspended particles, and water transparency. This paper describes empirical algorithms for the estimation of these variables using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data. Ground data were taken from several Spanish lakes covering a variety of trophic statuses, ranging from oligotrophic to hypereutrophic. The studied lakes were the Albufera de Valencia and lakes and ponds of the Southeast Regional Park in Madrid. Empirical equations were obtained to estimate chlorophyll ${\mbi a}$ from the ratio in reflectance values between bands 2 and 4 of TM ( $\bf{ R^2 \, {\mmb =}\, 0.66}$ , ${\bf …