Satellite Monitoring of Boston Harbor Water Quality: Initial Investigations

The transformation of Boston Harbor from the “dirtiest in America" to a National Park Area is one of the most remarkable estuarine recoveries in the world. A long-term water quality dataset from 1991 to present exists in Boston Harbor due to a $3. 8 billion lawsuit requiring the harbor clean-up. This project uses discrete water sampling and underway transects with a towed vehicle coordinated with Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 to create surface maps of chlorophyll a (Chl a), dissolved organic matter (CDOM and DOC), total suspended solids (TSS), diffuse attenuation coefficient (Kd_490), and photic depth in Boston Harbor. In addition, 3 buoys have been designed, constructed, and deployed in Boston Harbor that measure Chl a and CDOM fluorescence, optical backscatter, salinity, temperature, and meteorological parameters. We are initially using summer and fall of 2015 to develop atmospheric corrections for conditions in Boston Harbor and develop algorithms for Landsat 8 data to estimate in water photic depth, TSS, Chl a, Kd_490, and CDOM. We will report on initial buoy and cruise data and show 2015 Landsat-derived distributions of water quality parameters. It is our hope that once algorithms for present Landsat imagery can be developed, historical maps of water quality can be constructed using in water data back to 1991.