AN EMPIRICAL REMOTE SENSING ALGORITHM TO RETRIEVE TOTAL SUSPENDED MATTER IN A LARGE ESTUARINE REGION

CAMIOLO, M.; COZZOLINO, E.; DOGLIOTTI, A.I.; SIMIONATO, C. G.; LASTA, C.

SCIENTIA MARINA

INST CIENCIAS MAR BARCELONA

Año: 2019 vol. 83 p. 53 - 60

0214-8358

The Río de la Plata is a shallow and large estuary located at approximately 35°S on the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean. The Río de la Plata carries a high amount of nutrients and suspended particulate matter, both organic and inorganic, to the adjacent shelf waters and is considered among the most turbid estuarine systems in the world. The knowledge of the concentration of those materials and their spatial and temporal variability are critical to any biological study in the Río de la Plata. In this work, the relationship between suspended particulate matter and turbidity is empirically established in order to derive suspended particulate matter maps from satellite data (MODIS-Aqua) for the Río de la Plata region. A strong correlation between suspended particulate matter and turbidity was found (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.91) and the linear regression (slope = 0.76 and intercepts = 12.78, R2 = 0.83) explained 83% of the variance. The validation of the empirical algorithm, using co-located and coincident satellite and in situ measurements, showed good results with a low mean absolute error (14.60%), and a small and positive bias (3.04%), indicating that the estimated SPM values tend to slightly overestimate the field values.