Remote Sensing Applications for Water Quality Assessment
Summary
Remote sensing has become an indispensable tool for monitoring and assessing water quality at watershed, regional and global scales. By capturing electromagnetic signals from spaceborne, airborne and unmanned aerial vehicle platforms, researchers can estimate key parameters such as total suspended solids, chlorophyll-a, coloured dissolved organic matter and turbidity without extensive field campaigns. Methodologies range from empirical band-ratio algorithms and physics-based radiative transfer models to machine-learning approaches that integrate multispectral and hyperspectral data. Commonly employed sensors include Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, PlanetScope and advanced UAV spectrometers, each offering a trade-off between spatial resolution, spectral coverage and revisit frequency. These techniques support the detection of sediment plumes in rivers, eutrophication trends in lakes and harmful algal blooms in coastal zones, directly informing water resource management, pollution mitigation and public health strategies. Persistent challenges include accurate atmospheric correction, sun-glint removal and alignment of satellite signals with in situ observations. Recent advances in high-resolution microsatellites and data-fusion frameworks promise to enhance the spatial and temporal fidelity of water quality maps, thereby strengthening decision-making across ecological, regulatory and disaster-response contexts.
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Remote Sensing Applications for Water Quality Assessment publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in remote sensing applications for water quality assessment across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Total suspended solids (TSS): Concentration of fine particles in water, indicative of sediment load and turbidity.
Chlorophyll-a: Primary photosynthetic pigment used as a proxy for phytoplankton biomass and eutrophication.
Coloured dissolved organic matter (CDOM): Light-absorbing organic compounds derived from decaying vegetation and microbial activity.
Band-ratio algorithm: Mathematical ratio of reflectance values at two or more wavelengths to isolate specific water constituents.
Atmospheric correction: Process of removing atmospheric effects from satellite imagery to retrieve true surface reflectance.
References
- Comparative assessment of satellite-based models through Planetscope and landsat-8 for determining physico-chemical water quality parameters in Varuna River (India). Applied Water Science (2025).
- Inland Water Quality Monitoring Using Airborne Small Cameras: Enhancing Suspended Sediment Retrieval and Mitigating Sun Glint Effects. Drones (2025).
- A Comprehensive Review on Water Quality Parameters Estimation Using Remote Sensing Techniques. Sensors (2016).
- First Experiences in Mapping Lake Water Quality Parameters with Sentinel-2 MSI Imagery. Remote Sensing (2016).
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