Seminars : Documents

Multi-sensor satellite-based water quality monitoring in the North Sea
Dimitry van der Zande (RBINS)

Over the last decade, services for marine monitoring and management have emerged using data from medium resolution ocean colour remote sensors such as SeaWiFS, ENVISAT/MERIS and MODIS/AQUA. The success of these mainstream ocean colour sensors has stimulated the follow-up missions, Sentinel-3/OLCI and VIIRS, giving continuity to this family of medium resolution ocean colour sensors. Despite considerable advantages of the medium resolution sensors in coverage with respect to in situ monitoring techniques, they have critical limitations of spatial and temporal resolution (typically 300m, 1/day) with respect to user requirements. Today’s availability of Earth Observation (EO) data is unprecedented including traditional medium resolution ocean colour systems, high resolution land sensors (e.g. Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, 10-60m, 1/5 days) and geostationary satellites (e.g. Seviri, 4-6km, 1/15min). In this seminar we will present the necessary steps needed to build an operational water quality monitoring service based on these multi-scale satellite data including scientific algorithm development, water quality product validation, multi-scale synergy products and the development of data cubes to extract relevant information out of the terabytes of data. This concept will be demonstrated in a use case highly relevant to the user community: 'eutrophication assessment of the Belgian part of the North Sea for European Directives (MSFD, WFD)'