The Chesapeake Bay is a valued ecological, economic, recreational, cultural and scenic resource. The Bay watershed States and the District of Columbia, in conjunction with the EPA Chesapeake Bay Program, have worked and teamed together over the past 20 years to protect and restore the Bay ecosystem. A key component of this effort is water quality and habitat monitoring to assess the impact of management actions and natural processes, and evaluate habitat parameters on living resources such as submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV), oysters, and fisheries. Using aerial and satellite remote sensing imagery has become a practical and effective means of monitoring water quality in a timely manner. Of particular interest in evaluation of water clarity are several initiative measures. Specifically, Secchi-Disk Transparency (SDT) and Chlorophyll a (Chl-a) have been widely accepted as critical indicators of water quality and their reliable estimation using satellite imagery provides a cost effective and speedy means for water quality monitoring. Work done at Water Resources Center, University of Minnesota has demonstrated the feasibility of performing regional assessment of lake water quality using LANDSAT image data. This paper investigates an approach similar to their work but uses a different type of satellite imagery, EO-1 ALI imagery where the SDT and Chl-a are also used as indicators to estimate water quality for the Chesapeake Bay and DC area (Potomac River). In doing so, three major issues are investigated, which are (1) the study site that is an open Bay area, not a self-contained lake; (2) investigation of applicability of equations that are used to specify the SDT and Chl-a to our Bay area study; (3) the use of a different type of satellite imagery for water quality monitoring. This paper develops techniques to address these three issues and presents preliminary experiments which show encouraging results.
Modeling Impacts of Submersed Aquatic Vegetation on Sediment Dynamics Under Storm Conditions in Upper Chesapeake Bay