The evaluation of water pollution with the help of remote sensing tools

Abstract

With the growing population, there is a growing demand for quality drinking water. Especially in developing parts of the world, this is a serious problem. The aim of this work is to test remote sensing methods for water quality monitoring. The presented part of the project is focused on introducing the process of water pollution assessment using vegetation indices, which are derived only using RGB images. Water quality monitoring is based on satellite imagery Landsat 8 and UAV images Phantom 3. As reference data was used in-site measurements in profiles points. In-site measurements were repeated every month in the vegetation period from April to September. Based on regression analysis, the equation for the calculation of the amount of chlorophyll and the statistical evaluation of the quality of these equations is derived for each vegetation index. The best results were achieved using the ratio aquatic vegetation index (RAVI) and ExG (Excess green) indices of 97% and 96.8% respectively.