Toxic cyanobacterial blooms are an increasing international concern, but traditional field monitoring for detection involving identification and cell counting imparts a lag time and can be limited in spatial extent. Overcoming the vast geographic distances needing sampling is a particular challenge; Recently launched satellite sensors offer the potential of high resolution, wide scale and frequent monitoring of water quality in inland water bodies of a range of sizes in support of the development of early bloom alerts for water managers; and provide an appealing complement to water managers for bloom monitoring.
We report on continued Australian strategic investment in inland water quality remote sensing to develop tools to assess and visualise algal blooms across larger spatial scales to support cyanobacterial monitoring. The tool is built upon the Australian Geoscience Data Cube (AGDC) for NSW DPI Water, a 19 year time series of consistently pre-processed Landsat data for the Australian continent. New image acquisitions can be processed in near real time to provide a rapid state-wide overview of overall algal alert status, or finer scale bloom dynamics in individual water bodies. Current data can be displayed with historical data to allow the up to date situation to be put into a longer term context.
To overcome spatial resolution limitations and to assist in satellite validation we have also developed a low cost, low maintenance optical sensor operating on similar principles for remote deployment in sensor networks.
The presentation will outline the AGDC, processing and visualisation systems that have been produced, as well as introduce the near surface sensor. Their power in helping management decision making on algal bloom risk across wider spatial areas will be outlined.