Estimating of water quality parameters using SAR and thermal microwave remote sensing data

This paper presented a novel approach built upon the method of inversion of EM scattering model to estimate the Water Quality Parameters (WQPs). A Small Perturbation Model (SPM) using the Gaussian spectrum is used as a scattering model to calculate physical proprieties of water area. This approach is mainly depended on the thermal and SAR images as an active and passive satellite data. The parameters of the surface roughness are derived from backscattering coefficients (in VV or HH polarizations) which are specifically determined via TerraSAR-X (TSX) images. The thermal band image is used to obtain the temperature of the water surface which we used in our proposed approach. In order to validate it, a data set collected in situ which is used to evaluate the parameters of water quality estimated from satellite images. The obtained results improve the ability to estimate some parameters water quality in rivers using thermal and SAR images with high accuracy. Finally, this result will consolidate future researches to find out other quality parameters in water.