Mapeo-Water: Drone Data Processing into Water Quality Products

Although airborne drones are used frequently for agricultural, biodiversity and other applications, it's use for water quality monitoring is relatively new. There are a couple of additional complexities, including unknown optical water properties, atmospheric contribution and a need for direct georeferencing. This paper describes the MapEO-water service, which is a cloud-based service to derive water-leaving reflectance and derived products (chlorophyll-a, turbidity and presence of marine litter/plastic). Specific attention will go to the drone/camera system set-up, data collection and data processing workflow. Results will be shown for a test case in Lake Balaton, the largest lake of Europe situated in Hungary.