Retrieval of water constituents from multiple earth observation sensors in lakes, rivers and coastal zones

Earth observation sensors collect valuable data of aquatic systems, which are further used for the retrieval of concentrations of water constituents such as suspended matter and phytoplankton. Different sensors deliver data with various spatial and temporal resolution ranging from 1 day to approximately a month in time and from 1 km to 3 m in space, high spatial resolution being connected with low temporal resolution and vice versa. In order to have detailed information on both spatial distribution of water constituents and their temporal variability, that is especially important for small aquatic objects like rivers and lakes, it is necessary to combine the data from several sensors. This creates certain problems as also spectral and radiometric resolutions of the sensors can be different. The use of the modular image processing system MIP for the integration of data from different sensor is advantageous as it ensures standardized product outputs for a variety of satellite sensors such as MERIS, MODIS, SPOT, IKONOS, RapidEye. The processing chain of this system is automatically adapted to the sensor parameters as well as to the region specific inherent optical properties (SIOP) of the water basin. Various worldwide applications and time series for lakes, rivers and coastal areas are demonstrated and discussed.