Regional Models for High-Resolution Retrieval of Chlorophyll a and TSM Concentrations in the Gorky Reservoir by Sentinel-2 Imagery

The possibilities of chlorophyll a (Chl a) and total suspended matter (TSM) retrieval using Sentinel-2/MSI imagery and in situ measurements in the Gorky Reservoir are investigated. This water body is an inland freshwater ecosystem within the territory of the Russian Federation. During the algal bloom period, the optical properties of water are extremely heterogeneous and vary on scales of tens of meters. Additionally, they vary in time under the influence of currents and wind forcing. In this case, the usage of the traditional station-based sampling to describe the state of the reservoir may be uninformative and not rational. Therefore, we proposed an original approach based on simultaneous in situ measurements of the remote sensing reflectance by a single radiometer and the concentration of water constituents by an ultraviolet fluorescence LiDAR from a high-speed gliding motorboat. This approach provided fast data collection including 4087 synchronized LiDAR and radiometric measurements with high spatial resolutions of 8 m for two hours. A part of the dataset was coincided with Sentinel-2 overpass and used for the development of regional algorithms for the retrieval of Chl a and TSM concentrations. For inland waters of the Russian Federation, such research was performed for the first time. The proposed algorithms can be used for regular environmental monitoring of the Gorky Reservoir using ship measurements or Sentinel-2 images. Additionally, they can be adapted for neighboring reservoirs, for example, for other seven reservoirs on the Volga River. Moreover, the proposed ship measurement approach can be useful in the practice of limnological monitoring of inland freshwater ecosystems with high spatiotemporal variability of the optical properties.