Application of Landsat 8 imagery to regional-scale assessment of lake water quality

•Tool to support regional lake quality assessment using Landsat 8.•The best method for estimation of crucial parameters used in remote sensing lake monitoring.•The model which allows to estimate the current ecological status of the lakes.•The method to calibrate the results of estimation using the lakes with known current state or defined as reference state lakes. The aim of the project was to create a tool with which to support regional lake quality assessment using Landsat 8 imagery data. The model of assigning the ecological status was implemented in GIS for the northern part of Poland and classifies lake quality for several classes according to classification of WFD using two basic assumptions. The first is that there exists a combination of OLI bands (OLI2/OLI4 was used) which correlates well with the trophic state of the lakes; the second assumption is that the reference trophic state depends on the mean depth of the lake. The model uses a lake geodatabase which contains lakes outlines, raster masks of lakes and attribute information about their mean depth. There is no need to provide any field data when using this tool, as calibration of the model is done using subsets of lakes which were classified using legally defined methods. The tool allows fast classification of 2800 lakes from the area of interest. The results show good agreement between satellite and expert based methods.