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Development of optical criteria to discriminate various types of highly turbid lake waters

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Abstract

Our aim was to refine the optical classification of turbid waters in order to improve the performance of water color algorithms. Bio-optical measurements and sampling of optically active substances were performed in highly turbid lakes Taihu, Chaohu, and Dianchi, and in Three Gorges reservoir in China. Based on strong correlations between trough depths of remote sensing reflectance (R rs(λ)) near 680 nm (denoted as TD680) and the ratios of inorganic suspended matter (ISM) to total suspended matter (TSM) concentrations, an empirical model was developed for water classification. In the 400–900 nm spectral range, different correlations between R rs(λ), TSM and chlorophyll a (Chla) concentrations indicate discrepancies among the following ISM/TSM ranges: ISM/TSM ≤ 0.5, 0.5 < ISM/TSM < 0.8, and ISM/TSM ≥ 0.8. Corresponding findings support an important conclusion that only high ISM/TSM ratios, usually above 0.5, and using the more sensitive and stable near infrared spectral range (730–820 nm), can assure good performances of the TSM remote sensing algorithms. Meanwhile, the particulate absorption a p(λ) and scattering b p(λ) were strongly influenced by different ranges of ISM/TSM ratios. Typically the a p(675) peaks became more and more vague as ISM/TSM increased, and the b p(λ) values first decreased and then increased with a marked inflexion at ISM/TSM ≈ 0.5. The TD680 threshold values were derived to discriminate three types of turbid waters, i.e., Type 1 (TD680 ≥ 0.0082 sr−1), Type 2 (0.0082 sr−1 > TD680 > 0 sr−1), and Type 3 (TD680 ≤ 0 sr−1). This study provides a promising tool for identifying various types of highly turbid waters, and is significant for the development of class-based algorithms of water color remote sensing.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a National Natural Science Foundations (No. 40971215), a National Science and Technology Support Project (No. 2008BAC34B05) of China. Additional financial support was received from the Foundation of Graduate Innovation Training plan of Jiangsu Province (No. CX08B_015Z) and excellent thesis cultivation fund of Nanjing Normal University (No. 181200000220). Yu Yang, Rui Xia, Xin Jin, Yanfei Wang, Bing Yin, Hong Zhang, Yifan Xu, Zhonghua Liu, and Xin Xu are acknowledged for their participation in the field experiment. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments.

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  1. College of Remote Sensing, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, JiangSu, China

    Deyong Sun

  2. Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment (Nanjing Normal University), Nanjing, JiangSu, China

    Yunmei Li, Qiao Wang, Chengfeng Le, Changchun Huang & Kun Shi

  3. Satellite Environment Application Center, Ministry of Environmental Protection, Beijing, China

    Qiao Wang

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  1. Deyong Sun
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Sun, D., Li, Y., Wang, Q. et al. Development of optical criteria to discriminate various types of highly turbid lake waters. Hydrobiologia 669, 83–104 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-011-0652-1

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