Monitoring Taihu water quality by using high resolution satellite image

The application of remote sensing technology to water quality monitoring for inland lakes has special significance for lake management at regional scales. Many researching studies have estimated water clarity by using MODIS and Landsat imagery. As the resolution was not high enough, the obtained map data usually cannot find the pollution sources (outlets of rivers or channels). In our study, we sought to map the water quality indexes (TP total phosphorus, TN total nitrate) of Taihu Lake in high resolution by using the Worldview-2 imagery. We obtained one set of Worldview-2 images at 02:47:36 on 2009-12-31(UTC) from DigitalGlobe Inc. The field data was collected by water quality monitoring stations and boats for water sampling on Dec. 23, 2009. We tried to find the correlation between bands of Worldview-2 and the water quality data regarding TP and TN. Our results suggested that there was a high correlation between Band 1 and TP, and a high correlation between Band 8 and TN.