Integrated satellite data fusion and mining for monitoring lake water quality status of the Albufera de Valencia in Spain

Carolina Doña; Ni-Bin Chang; Vicente Caselles; Juan M Sánchez; Antonio Camacho; Jesús Delegido; Benjamin W Vannah

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2014.12.003

Integrated satellite data fusion and mining for monitoring lake water quality status of the Albufera de Valencia in Spain

J Environ Manage. 2015 Mar 15:151:416-26. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2014.12.003. Epub 2015 Jan 17.

Authors

Carolina Doña¹, Ni-Bin Chang², Vicente Caselles¹, Juan M Sánchez³, Antonio Camacho⁴, Jesús Delegido⁵, Benjamin W Vannah⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Earth Physics and Thermodynamics, University of Valencia, Burjassot, Valencia, Spain.
² Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA. Electronic address: nchang@ucf.edu.
³ Department of Applied Physics, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Almadén, Ciudad Real, Spain.
⁴ Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, University of Valencia, Burjassot, Valencia, Spain.
⁵ Image Processing Laboratory, University of Valencia, Paterna, Valencia, Spain.
⁶ Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.

PMID: 25602695
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2014.12.003

Abstract

Lake eutrophication is a critical issue in the interplay of water supply, environmental management, and ecosystem conservation. Integrated sensing, monitoring, and modeling for a holistic lake water quality assessment with respect to multiple constituents is in acute need. The aim of this paper is to develop an integrated algorithm for data fusion and mining of satellite remote sensing images to generate daily estimates of some water quality parameters of interest, such as chlorophyll a concentrations and water transparency, to be applied for the assessment of the hypertrophic Albufera de Valencia. The Albufera de Valencia is the largest freshwater lake in Spain, which can often present values of chlorophyll a concentration over 200 mg m(-3) and values of transparency (Secchi Disk, SD) as low as 20 cm. Remote sensing data from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhance Thematic Mapper (ETM+) images were fused to carry out an integrative near-real time water quality assessment on a daily basis. Landsat images are useful to study the spatial variability of the water quality parameters, due to its spatial resolution of 30 m, in comparison to the low spatial resolution (250/500 m) of MODIS. While Landsat offers a high spatial resolution, the low temporal resolution of 16 days is a significant drawback to achieve a near real-time monitoring system. This gap may be bridged by using MODIS images that have a high temporal resolution of 1 day, in spite of its low spatial resolution. Synthetic Landsat images were fused for dates with no Landsat overpass over the study area. Finally, with a suite of ground truth data, a few genetic programming (GP) models were derived to estimate the water quality using the fused surface reflectance data as inputs. The GP model for chlorophyll a estimation yielded a R(2) of 0.94, with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) = 8 mg m(-3), and the GP model for water transparency estimation using Secchi disk showed a R(2) of 0.89, with an RMSE = 4 cm. With this effort, the spatiotemporal variations of water transparency and chlorophyll a concentrations may be assessed simultaneously on a daily basis throughout the lake for environmental management.

Keywords: Data fusion; Data mining; Lake management; Machine learning; Remote sensing; Water quality.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Data Mining
Ecosystem
Environmental Monitoring / methods
Lakes / chemistry*
Spacecraft
Spain
Water Quality / standards*
Water Supply / standards*