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Creating water quality maps from remote sensed images with Python
Introduction
Water security is one of the sustainable goals for 2030, set by the United Nations — UN [1]. Having water available in proper quantity and quality is essential for life on Earth. There are estimations that the world’s population can reach 10 billion people by 2050. Moreover, climate changes are also pushing more pressure in water availability, increasing water-related hazards, such as droughts.
Improving the water governance is essential, and stakeholders need to be fed with data to take good decisions. Water quality parameters are costly to be obtained, as it needs to be obtained in the field, and they are usually punctual, difficult to be generalized spatially through large areas, or along a river, for example. Many water bodies lack water quality measurements, especially in developing countries.
In this context, the use of satellite sensors is emerging as one viable solution to measure some water quality parameters from space. The copernicus mission from European Space Agency, for example provides medium resolution images with up to 10m, every 4–5 days. Spectral resolution is also improving as new satellites are being launched.
In my previous post Water Detection in High Resolution Satellite Images using the waterdetect python…
