Land surface remote sensing and geographical information systems for water quality modeling

Recent trends in surface water quality of various rivers in the USA and abroad clearly demonstrate an increasing pattern of solute concentrations. These changes in surface water quality are mainly attributed to human influences that both transform land-use/land-cover from one type to another and that change or intensify the management regime on lands over regional and global scales. Space-borne satellite observations in the visible and near-infrared bands enable us to gather information on land-use/land-cover on a frequent basis which can be used for real-time water quality modeling. Geographical information systems (GIS) provide an appropriate technology for efficient storage, handling, manipulation of large volumes of spatially referenced data derived from remote sensing. This paper demonstrates that both land surface remote sensing and GIS coupled with an empirical model (viz. the export coefficient model) can successfully be employed to estimate surface water quality. The approach has a potential for real time estimation of surface wafer quality on regional, continental and global scales